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sbdaman

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I've shared this on YN before but I'm a big fan of this piece by Kenneth Taylor (well, an essay pieced together from his lectures).

The Robots Are Coming

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kenneth-taylor-robots-...

"However exactly you divide up the AI landscape, it is important to distinguish what I call AI-as-engineering from what I call AI-as-cognitive-science. AI-as-engineering isn’t particularly concerned with mimicking the precise way in which the human mind-brain does distinctively human things. The strategy of engineering machines that do things that are in some sense intelligent, even if they do what they do in their own way, is a perfectly fine way to pursue artificial intelligence. AI-as-cognitive science, on the other hand, takes as its primary goal that of understanding and perhaps reverse engineering the human mind.

[...]

One reason for my own skepticism is the fact that in recent years the AI landscape has come to be progressively more dominated by AI of the newfangled 'deep learning' variety [...] But if it’s really AI-as-cognitive science that you are interested in, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it may take a bit more than our cool new deep learning hammer to build a humanlike mind.

[...]

If I am right that there are many mysteries about the human mind that currently dominant approaches to AI are ill-equipped to help us solve, then to the extent that such approaches continue to dominate AI into the future, we are very unlikely to be inundated anytime soon with a race of thinking robots—at least not if we mean by “thinking” that peculiar thing that we humans do, done in precisely the way that we humans do it."

Duo Outage 3 years ago

I work in post-sec and this is very common practice. There are few key players that tend to capture the majority of schools in the States/Canada for specific tech solutions. Blackboard/Canvas/D2L for LSMs, Shibboleth for SSO, Duo for 2FA, Cisco AnyConnect for VPNs.

tech solutions in the field tend to be incredibly low risk given the size and make-up of the anticipated users (enterprise services with thousands of employees and tens of thousands of students). For public institutions, there's the added element of public sector risk avoidance.

The Gamestop one seems to have a contrarian/anti-authority tilt to it that the other's don't really have (that I've seen, though I'm not paying much attention). I think some of the people on the Gamestop sub really, truly believe themselves to be in a battle that will determine the future of the financial system (the world?). It's quite unhinged.