baobabaobab

GNU's Not Uber, FOSS won't give me a ride to the airport. So, there are nice things you don't get either way.

But I doubt it is really in the interest of the manufacturers who want to be able to offer a complete "solution".

Then they'll be leaving room for a newcomer to do it.

but definitely options for professionals that make their living outdoors

My thinking was also that this makes a great platform for professional tools that are currently standalone devices. Multimeters, surveying equipment, thermal inspection tools. Maybe a microscope or even a microfluidics device.

The physical world is so slow to give you feedback, I think DeepMind has the right approach with video games, you can move to 3d games, then games with physics where the agent directly controls artificial muscles, while iterating much faster than you can in the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMR5mjCFZCw&feature=youtu.be

While it seems intuitive that most individual "intelligent" systems in animals can be seen as unsupervised, isn't life itself driven in a reinforced manner?

I think apparently unsupervised systems could be explained by models that predict a future input given their current state and input. Correct predictions are reinforced. An RNN-like model.

(If the network is small, it should learn some compressed representation, which can be used as an input to a more abstract layer that makes more general predictions over a longer time period)

What we don't know is whether there is a logistic curve on technology as a whole. Belief in the Singularity is premised on this not being the case.

That's a version of the Singularity to extreme even for Kurzweil. It's premised on technological growth not hitting the log portion of the curve before machine intelligence passes humans.

Their owners want safe and steady profit. They aren't interesting in taking risks.

Look at how the plastics industry handled the scientific evidence that Bisphenol-A affects development. They switched to closely related chemicals with less data available, Bisphenol-B, Bisphenol-S. Unsurprisingly, studies are now finding that exposure to these chemicals has similar effects.

I suppose we'll ban those now too, and we can see we can test some other plasticizer out on a few billion people.

Experiential and statistical evidence presented in a summary meant to convince a person of something would be known as an argument.

The West Antarctic Ice sheet is still flowing into the ocean, and accelerating. It's actually not even clear atmospheric warming is the ultimate cause. But it is clear that it's reached a literal tipping point. The glaciers have retreated past a point where the slope tips inland, and warm water is running down hill, melting the bottom. No amount of emissions reductions can stop it, we would need to pump heat away from the underside of the glaciers to slow it down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:West_Antarctic_Collapse.o...

The other sources are glacial melt, heat expansion, and water storage on land decreasing.

You need both the models and the data. Facts without theory answer only what happened, not why, you can't make projections without theory. Theory without facts... pretty obvious problem there.

Sea levels are rising 2.6-2.9mm per year.

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

Complete conjecture, but my money is on IPCCs estimates for other sources being a little too conservative, not some entirely new explanation.

You might have a tip about a merger because a PI is watching a corporate parking lot. Just because something is a secret, doesn't mean an insider leak is the only way for it to be known.

Convincing people to buy things using psychological manipulation is what marketing is all about.

The hobbyist. Why would anyone else be liable for something a person did that then failed and caused harm?

The hobbyist isn't the one with money. The manufacturer will be sued, and they usually settle because there is probably something they could have done that would have made the failure less likely, injury trials are bad press, and jury sympathy is always on the injured little guy's side.

This is how it plays out with physical products, I don't see why it would be any different with code.

He didn't have a stable enough income to always maintain a gym membership. I doubt a daily commute and rent would be cheaper.

You're looking at a piece of equipment that can be used to generate income, maybe that's what it's for. It also could have been cheap/broken/free, and they intend to flip it.

I think it's easier to defend the claim that the kids lacked guidance and support to take advantage of the education provided for them.

That guidance is a critical part of a "good" education. Unfortunately, we leave it up to parents and don't have a way to teach them how to raise a successful kid.

How would you propose I monetize creating my own free open-source programming language?

Forget it, work for the man, save your money, retire young, then work as much as you want on your GIF art syntax programming language.

That's the proof of concept prototype. If they achieve their stated targets, it would be a leap in computing capability.

http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/08/06/exascale-breakthrough-weve...

"The analysis unit works in tandem with a traditional supercomputer. Initial models will start at 1.32 petaflops and will ramp up to 300 petaflops by 2020.

The Optalysys Optical Solver Supercomputer will initially offer 9 petaflops of compute power, increasing to 17.1 exaflops by 2020."

Recognizing patterns in data is so easy to do, that how easy it is, turns out to be a major problem in machine learning. You can always find some explanation that perfectly fits all the data you see, but that doesn't mean it will fit the data you haven't yet seen.

The challenge is finding the simplest patterns that will generalize to explain the most data, while wasting as little effort as possible on the irrelevant patterns. In high dimension data, the number of possible relationships to analyze explode, you can find patterns everywhere you look, so it's deciding where to bother looking with your limited resources that's hard.

That patterns are nothing special doesn't seem obvious to us because, evolution has done a pretty good job solving this problem(in the domain of inputs we evolved to deal with), and we only perceive those patterns that are likely to generalize.

This way we could say the entire universe is just a big chemical reaction. It wouldn't even be an incorrect view. It just wouldn't be useful for anything.

It's a world view, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's useless. Religions are world views, and they have certainly been put to use.

If it's true, does it even matter if it's useful? Maybe truth is more important than utility.

We could also just use general tax revenue. You don't have to have a different tax for every expense.

Wait, do people think that mental health disorders somehow don't involve brain function? What else could it possibly be?

To top it off, congress wouldn't actually allocate funds to any of it.

At least in my corner of the industry (commercial) , we've been asking for better test cycles because we don't want to wind up in a situation where we are chasing fuel economy on the test cycle at the expense of fuel economy in the real world. The regulators want to keep the same test cycles so they can measure how emissions and fuel economy are changing over time.

Internally, we have much better test cycles correlated to real world routes that we use to validate fuel economy simulations.

NASA actually did a tethered artificial gravity experiment during Gemini with the target docking vehicle. They got it working, although they only spun it up to like .01g.

The true soul of Seattle is complaining about the new people moving here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SF7UoO1pI&feature=youtu.be

I have not played much KSP, is there anything as realistic as orbiter?

No, it's the most realistic game about spaceflight, but it's not a simulator.

I actually used this page as a guide to write a orbital rendezvous computer plugin, back before that was a built in feature in the game.

It's the best (in depth) resource on orbital mechanics I ever found.