Disqus - Latest Comments for msg

Re: Quinns vs. Tom Vasel: Who is more wrong?

msg — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 14:16:42 -0000

We play Hanabi with no table talk, and I agree with you. It's a perfect diamond.

It is a bottomless telepathy game, because one move can mean so many different things in different contexts, given the plays and clues that have already happened (and not happened!). There is a learning curve while you work out a new set of conventions with a new group, which is also fun. So a clue can mean different things based on games that have already happened too.

I still remember an incredible moment where I played a 4 that everyone knew no one had given me any information about... and it worked, because I'd been paying attention to the flow.

I'm intrigued by the idea that a group of computers could solve Hanabi, but that style is not appealing to me as a player.

Re: Here’s How Donald Trump Can Fix His Racist Branding Problem

msg — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 11:18:44 -0000

If you...

call African countries shitholes in private...
prefer not to have black people handling your money...
discriminate against black families in housing...
believe that genes confer superiority...
head up a conspiracy to slander the first black president as illegitimate...
cage and separate Hispanic parents from children to send a message...
talk out of both sides of your mouth about goddamned Nazis...
target multi racial and multi ethnic Congresswomen by telling them to go back home, when they are all American...
...

you might just be a racist.

Now what I'd like to hear is the countervailing evidence that Trump is not a racist. For instance, that he believes that white people are not genetically superior to people with other. pigmentation. Or that he has demonstrated a real appreciation for racial and ethnic diversity.

Him saying that he does not have a racist bone in his body, unfortunately, does not count.

Re: Raw Data: Workers Earning Minimum Wage

msg — Thu, 30 May 2019 15:41:40 -0000

Curious about the percentiles. The federal minimum wage is around the 1 percentile now. But how has the 5, 10, etc percentile really changed over time? These would show if wages are really rising relative to the minimum wage or merely plateauing in a different place.

Re: AI May Be Coming, But It’s Not Here Yet

msg — Thu, 02 May 2019 01:36:13 -0000

I would say it's not artificial general intelligence.

But even such a general intelligence would need goals, even if they were only meta goals to find worthy goals (worthiness implies a search for a values system, etc).

Norvig and Russell argue in the outset of their textbook, Artificial Intelligence, that the definition of thinking rationally is squishy, and it will always be hard to tell if a computer is "thinking". Instead, they say, let's focus on whether a computer system is acting as if it is rational. Hopefully this will free us from assumptions about what it means to think and move us to the playing field of solving useful problems.

Re: AI May Be Coming, But It’s Not Here Yet

msg — Wed, 01 May 2019 23:49:53 -0000

Computer scientist / software engineer here. My advice is to read the Wikipedia article about AI winter. There are periodic booms and busts that redefine the marquee technologies of the day and the funding environment for AI projects.

For instance, the Georgetown-IBM experiment in automatic language translation was much heralded in its day. The scientists thought they would be able to solve unlimited machine translation in three to five years. That was in 1954. Ten years later, its funding was sharply reduced after little visible progress.

Scientists study artificial general intelligence, a computer that can learn anything. It is the Holy Grail of the field. It probably relies on aspects of intelligence that are difficult to model and poorly understood. But that's not where success happens in the field.

Success in AI is achieved in highly constrained domains. Scientists and engineers have to be able to define the domain for the computer and give it clear goals to pursue. Then the computer is usually free to simulate its way to knowledge and expertise. The techniques used to solve one problem are not easily transferable to another.

We have access to supercomputing power that would make the field's pioneers weep for joy, and that has opened up a whole new array of techniques to solve previously intractable problems.

But there are a lot of problems that are hard to formulate, or that don't have easy answers, or aren't amenable to modem methods. For this reason I don't see AI generally taking all jobs so much as picking off an industry here and there.

Finally I make an offer: if you want to have a job when the AI revolution arrives... learn to program the things. There is a shortage of qualified engineers and there probably will be for the foreseeable future.

Re: Are Democrats Moving Dangerously to the Left?

msg — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 14:50:58 -0000

Agree with much of the thread. We should reserve "leftist" for, at least, left-only policies.

Re: We Need Radical Thinking on Climate Change

msg — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 11:42:54 -0000

Making renewables so good that they're much cheaper than fossil fuels feels like the right long term play to me, because then capitalist running dogs can line up behind them. Carbon taxes and cap and trade are just speeding up this process.

Getting greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere seems much more edible in the sky to me. Reforestation would be great but beyond that it feels like weather control. I don't think we will control the weather by 2050. The atmosphere is huge. That said, try all the things?

Transitioning to cleaner cars feels possible and does a pretty good chunk. Maybe we should be investing in self driving cars, and outlaw self driving cars with internal combustion engines. Then everyone who wants a robot chauffeur will be replacing their personal usage with clean energy.

Re: Do You Believe in Climate Change? Really?

msg — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 01:39:43 -0000

Didn't read the thread, so you've probably gotten this a lot.

There's an iterated prisoner's dilemma that if I change my behavior, everyone else will free ride on me. I pick up a disadvantage against my peers. And because we don't reach some activation energy to change the planet's fate, my sacrifice hurts me much more than it saves everyone else. It amounts to nothing. So we all remain stuck in our local optima.

It would be like me trying to save the world from a meteor by starting a space program in my backyard. My last name isn't Bezos so coordinated resources and action are required.

It's a different story if we all hold hands and jump together. So what would you expect to see on that road? Activism. Broad scale movements. International agreements.

There will be some who lead by example. Is it important that that leader be me? No more than that everyone who believes in a cause should become a politician.

Re: Facebook Suddenly Realizes Its Privacy Controls are a Little Bit Confusing

msg — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 10:47:27 -0000

Ok, this thread needs one sympathetic reading. I'm not an astroturfer (do they still call it that), nor do I like Facebook. Nor do I think that their approach to privacy was good here... I'm putting on my former Amazon software developer hat and asking how this issue with scattered privacy controls happened.

It's simple: lots of individual software teams were responsible for different features on Facebook. They all recognized the need for privacy controls in their features, and provided them in a unique, contextually appropriate way for their feature. But only their feature. They are all bespoke privacy protections that, under the hood, don't operate in a common way or take place in a higher level ecosystem of privacy control.

I do see this as a failure for Facebook. When I worked at Amazon, we obsessed about keeping the private data of customers private by unifying and putting strict controls around customer data, whitelisting it on a need to know basis, and even investing in new technology that was explicitly only for this purpose. Facebook's failure to put privacy first, curate their ecosystem, and provide a unified user experience is the core issue.

Kevin is right that this is symptomatic of Facebook management dragging their feet when it comes to privacy. The hammer should have come down a long time ago. But it's also a symptom of an organization where teams operate independently and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Re: Opioid Crisis? What Opioid Crisis?

msg — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 03:46:28 -0000

Translation: Trump wants to pull a Duterte and kill a brown person on a ridealong.

Re: All the Song Lyrics You Love Are Puerile and Stupid

msg — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 01:00:18 -0000

As a songwriter and singer of the old school, I put lyrics beside all the other elements of music. Every element has to serve the whole. It follows that sometimes lyrics will be key to the effect, and sometimes they won't. It just depends on the song you want to make in the end. And in the best songs, the lyrics and the music will play well together to evoke the targeted mood.

Here are some modern musicians, heavy on the lyrics.

Sufjan Stevens
The National
They Might Be Giants (half of the time)
Andrew Bird
The New Pornographers
Aimee Mann
The Decemberists
Iron and Wine
Regina Spektor

Re: What Does a Yellow Light Mean?

msg — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 12:28:30 -0000

Polling service: there's something I've seen live streamers use called "strawpoll dot me" to take real time polls. It appears to be free. Probably worth a check.

Seattle driver. I guess the theme here is to minimize blocking traffic.

If you see a yellow light, you think about whether you can brake safely before you hit the stopping line, or crosswalk.
If it is a close call, you keep going.
If there are cars occupying the intersection or traffic on the far side of the intersection, you stop.
If you're turning left and the car opposite you is continuing straight, they are a jerk. If you're in front of the stopping line, you turn left on red.
If you're turning right, stop more often, because you can often proceed after the light turns red.

Re: Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs

msg — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 20:05:19 -0000

There are three obvious hypotheses about the evolution of a technical practice when an older generation doesn't agree with a younger generation.

1) Dinosaur: the old way is going to die off when those dinosaurs go extinct
2) Child: the young way is going to die off when those children grow up and go to war
3) Idealist: the issue will be decided through humble give and take and rational tradeoff analyses

I tried to frame this in terms of insult throwing.

I hit the tab key and it makes spaces appear in Emacs. This is the only true way. /sarcasm

See the links on this JWZ trackback.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/20...

Key quote: "My opinion is that the best way to solve the technical issues is to mandate that the ASCII #9 TAB character never appear in disk files: program your editor to expand TABs to an appropriate number of spaces before writing the lines to disk."

Re: Donald Trump Is No Conservative

msg — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 14:20:53 -0000

Donald Trump is only a conservative for now.

"There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic
word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces.
Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

"Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't
true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed
by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a
lot like communism that way."

http://digbysblog.blogspot....

Re: Tell the story of this picture

msg — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 10:26:01 -0000

I actually don't know what it's about. Not into cable news.

My first impression was that the guy said something offensive and realized he went too far. That explains his surprised and worried face and the ladies' disgusted faces.

How about this. The guy implied that women's proper place is in the home and it would be wrong for us to devote public resources to women's careers or child care.

One of the women is a talking head professional anchor and another one of the women is a mother devoted to women's rights. The guy votes Republican.

You're right that it's revealing my biases, but it's also revealing the only news story that's come to my attention in a month.

Re: An icon that means Publish

msg — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:16:31 -0000

This feels a little archaic, but I would use fa-book.

It means what publishing a book has always meant: that the pieces of paper you scribbled your notes on got set, printed, bound, and stuck in the bookstore for anyone to read.

Only digitally.

Re: Minecraft Alpha 1.2.1, Minecraft Server 0.2.3

msg — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:03:10 -0000

I'm sure someone pointed this out below, but here is how you solve the non-bijective portal thing:

Make it impossible to have two active portals in the same 8 x 8 xy in the real world. If one is lit, the other one can't be. Then you enforce that for every portal in the nether, there is exactly one lit portal in the real world.

If there are zero corresponding portals in the real world while the player is in the Nether, a new lit portal will be created when the player crosses back over. To alter the mapping to some new portal in the 8 x 8, you have to destroy this first one.

It might also make sense to be able to "quench" a portal. I can turn it on with flint and steel, but I don't think I can turn it off without destroying.

Re: http://monkey.org/~marius/self-contained-emacs.html

msg — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:37:11 -0000

Agreed, between tramp and ssh-mode I am a pretty happy camper.

It could be nice if the remote hosts are not accessible from your home emacs. For instance, you're a consultant, or you want the same configuration at home and at work. Then it might make sense to keep it all portable.

Re: Communicating with code

msg — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:02:50 -0000

I had this problem recently at work (developing C++). We were debating between using concrete objects for a certain datatype and creating a Javascript-like Properties Pattern dynamic object system within C++, then implementing our objects within it. We are on deadlines and I argued that to use concrete objects was better understood and implementable.

We went around on this on and off for a couple of weeks, but there was no code to disagree about, so nobody won the argument. Now we're doing the JS-like thing...

Your point is well-taken.

Re: The road less traveled: The coolest thing you'll see at CES all day

msg — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:45:38 -0000

Accessibility for the less mobile individual, for instance a blind or paraplegic person

Re: The lame duck ducks, redux (Scripting News)

msg — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:46:14 -0000

Seriously? Protesting a profoundly misguided presidency? Somebody fetch the smelling salts!

I take the point about not being physical and threatening to harm people during a protest. But this is not the larger point you are trying to make.

And no, you can't ban shoes, someone else will just throw their laptop or phone or pen and pad. All you can do is be the kind of leader that people do not want to throw shoes at.

You are way off on respecting "the office of the presidency". This is the same feeling that tells believers in Romans 13 that disagreeing with the president is against their religion, that people who protest the war are not supporting the troops. You have to separate the man from the presidency, or risk creating a fundamentalist belief in Dear Leader.

Some of my best friends cannot pierce the veil of the presidency. Good or bad, the president is their president, and they supported him war in and hurricane out, as a question of faith and patriotism... until next January, when they will suddenly rediscover the meaning of loyal opposition and protest.

Re: McCain to suspend campaign? (Scripting News)

msg — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:58:00 -0000

What if they threw a debate and Obama showed up alone? That would be some riveting television. I'm not sure whether or not it would run afoul of the equal time rule because McCain would have had the opportunity to get his time, but turned it down.

This is crisis campaigning from McCain. His competitiveness is in crisis, not the bailout legislation. If anything, McCain's presence (and the urgency of his need to get back on the campaign trail) will lend undue haste and slop to a debate that needs to be careful, protracted, and nonpartisan.

That is, if you believe the crisis mongers in the White House, Treasury, and the Fed. They have cried "wolf at the door" too many times for me. Like Dave has said earlier, we can't trust them to fix things for our benefit...