sevenless

I've been wondering when neural networks might be able to compress a movie back down to the screenplay.

Or just live underground. There should be zones at around room temperature not too far off the surface.

Colonizing Mercury makes more sense than colonizing Mars. Much more abundant energy, reasonable gravity, plenty of water at the poles, and to avoid radiation you'd have to live underground in either place. The only drawback is the higher delta-V to get there.

Hitler got some of his worst ideas from the Eugenics Institute in California. Such as 'humanely' gassing undesirables and 'genetic defectives'. Eugenics, from Galton on, was considered progressive, enlightened, 'scientific' thought at the time.

Why not put the city at a pole?

Why? Video game economies are already bigger than many real world nations. If enough of us live in the video game world, game labor has value.

Already happening: WoW gold farmers.

Enjoyed

Some aspects of communication are likely to prove more challenging, Hinton predicted. “Irony is going to be hard to get,” he said. “You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don’t get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.”

Anything that behaves like an object, would be the obvious answer. GUI elements, things in games or simulations. More abstractly, an object's a namespace with persistent properties, so for something that has a persistent, possibly mutable, state, an object is the metaphor you want.

Whether data structures should be objects rather than primitives depends very much on the data.

I've heard there are two kinds of jobs: the kind where you shower before, and the kind where you shower after.

This is the same question as 'What values should we impose on society?' And that is an irreducible conflict. It's politics.

Programming a computer to perform a task is a powerful way to reveal hidden assumptions. What the problem of machine learning on human data reveals, is there is no objectivity. Our most 'objective' models will simply learn and then reinforce biases and prejudices and cause harm to people. We can't build objective, neutral, value-free models when it comes to human behavior, because humans change their behavior in response to the models. When we reject stereotypes we are imposing a set of values, just as much as when we embrace them. Machine learning forces us to confront the fact that this is exactly what we are doing.

There's a kind of philosophical crisis going on here. We need an entirely new way to think about the limits of objectivity in human sciences, and how to create ethical models in the presence of feedback between science and society. The language of objective physical science doesn't work.

If your lifestyle basically consists of stuff you could do for free, like cycling and internet, does that mean you're wealthy?

The trouble with this definition is that your lifestyle changes with your income. If I were making millions I might need yachts and private jets to maintain the good life.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - John Steinbeck

This is the problem with democracy: the people making the decisions often aren't those who are affected by them the most. It's how you define the demos. It's unjust for Americans to vote on policies that make the difference between life and death for large numbers of much poorer people, without giving them any say.

If democratic decision-making goes against vast improvements to the lives of billions of people, then democracy is simply wrong and should be abandoned.

Some of us don't think humans are less deserving on account of which side of a border they were born. Agreeing that free trade did somewhat hurt the American worker, America's loss helped lift hundreds of millions of people elsewhere (especially China) out of poverty.

It's hard to say they should have remained abjectly poor just so some Americans wouldn't experience a (fairly small) drop in living standard. A drop which could be alleviated by more socialist government policy anyway. From a global perspective, free trade is the best thing for improving the welfare of humans going.

How about engineering a society that is a bit kinder to everyone rather than inflicting poverty on anyone? It's also unjust for the 'burger flippers' who make your food to live in poverty.

We need creative types. Artists, musicians, historians etc are no less valuable than engineers. If the market thinks otherwise then the market is wrong.

I think you're saying the problem is that the camera is pointed straight at you, and you're taking this as having the intention to film you. But phone cameras can have a wide angle. You can film people without pointing the phone straight at them. Someone walking around with a phone simply pointed vaguely in your direction could very well be filming you, and you won't know. Plus, CCTVs certainly are filming you, and like I said, I don't see the parent poster complaining about that.

With Glass I feel it's a matter of interpreting their intention. Someone with a camera strapped to their head will naturally be pointing it straight at you if they talk to you, but this isn't necessarily the same as them having the intention to film you.

Plus, you know, there's no law against filming in public. Maybe that's just the goldfish bowl we're all living in now. Maybe Zuckerberg was right and privacy is dead, or at least a luxury most of us can't afford.

Sonar or lidar is a great idea if it can be made really small and not use much power.

Simply, don't include a camera, and make it obvious there's no camera - make the conspicuous bit transparent. You don't need a camera for many applications, like a GPS based heads up map display.

People walk around with their cellphones out, and you aren't complaining. Any of them could be filming you. Nor are you punching CCTV camera operators (I hope).

I always considered Google Glass could've been a success, if they'd only left the camera out. You could still do a lot with a head-up display that doesn't require video input.

Google was socially clueless, tried to do too much too fast and aroused public hostility. It could've been different. Wait till a wearable heads-up display is more accepted, then consider adding a camera.

You are right that the ideal gas law doesn't describe real gases but it can be a reasonable approximation for some applications, even at fairly low temperatures, provided the density isn't high.

Upholding an unjust law is not ethical. The right thing to do is repeal the law. It is absurd to say refugees and fruit pickers living on next to nothing are cutting in line, as though they are in an equal position to German mechanical engineers with PhDs.

My impression is that it's largely down to who they think gets those handouts. The perception that the face of need and poverty in the US is principally black, has always driven conservative opposition to 'big government', welfare and government paid healthcare, certainly since the Civil Rights Act.

This invites the question of whether socialist policies might have a better prospect in a hypothetical future US partitioned into ethno-states.

The nation-state is founded on the ideal of a sovereign state for a specific ethno-cultural group, and immigration fundamentally contradicts this. However, that is not a reason to oppose immigration. Mass immigration in sufficient volume will ultimately destroy the national culture. However, that culture has no inherent existence rights, not should the world be so arranged to preserve national cultures.

Consider, too, that a wealthy democracy could simply refuse to help a poor neighboring nation, and let them all starve to death. That would be unjust, even though it would be perfectly democratic. This indicates that there is a fundamental problem with democracy; democracy is wrong. The flaw is not hard to find: the people most affected by the democratic decision are not those who get to make the decision. The basic problem of democracy is how the demos is defined.

It is very probable that many people have xenophobic and racist instincts. Racism may be biologically ingrained. Probably 10-20% of people would like all immigrants deported. They will never be happy as long as they are not living in an ethnically 'pure' state. That is a good reason for not allowing those views any political representation. We should exclude immigration from being a legitimate democratic issue, because democratic votes on migration always turn into racist populism. Just like we shouldn't put minority rights to a vote, neither should immigration be put to a vote.

Yes, immigration disrupts the way people live, but so does (for example) industrialization. The interests of the indigenous population and immigrants do conflict. But there is still no ethical reason to stop people moving to improve their lives, to limit immigration, or to confer migration veto rights on their present of former inhabitants.

I think it's more that, they are systems that model what we know about gravity and light, just taken to an extreme point where light can't escape. That speculation is where the notion of black holes came from in the first place. If you have a physical system that behaves like gravity and light in some way and is easier to study, it's pretty reasonable to turn the dial up to a point where analog-light can't escape from analog-gravity and see if it can confirm your theories about black holes. It could quite easily lead to surprises.

Yep. Unfortunately, in some respects, we are the bad guys, our foreign policy is unjust and evil, and billions of people, including a tiny fraction who turn to terrorism, do have quite understandable grievances. Is there a peaceful way for them to get us to change what we're doing? Not that I'm aware of.

It'd take a dictator to fix the USA. I think I could do it, but it wouldn't be peaceful.

It's kind of true, though. Compared to other developed nations, the US is a country that doesn't care if you get sick or die. It's about as social-Darwinist as it gets. SF is even much more liberal than the rest of the country, so it's a best-case.

Don't mean to be inflammatory, just how I see it having traveled a lot. It's wonderful to be rich in the US, you can get anything you want, but there's no sympathy for the poor or unfortunate or social underclasses (immigrant labor, etc) at all.

I want to say that being homeless can be really bad for your mental health in its own right. I spent two months homeless and living around hostels a few years ago. The feeling of having nowhere to go home to starts to gnaw at you. You feel vulnerable and insecure, all the time. I got really paranoid, and had an emotional crisis before finding a permanent place.

Homelessness seems to be something anyone can get trapped in, like alcoholism. If you ended up long term homeless, nobody would think of employing you.

I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's and I've been to much poorer places. Side by side with the artists and web developers is a parallel tent city, and it seems to have a lot of mentally ill, people with drug problems, and traumatized military veterans. People who in any other nation would be taken care of.

Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans.

Comparing a company to a colonial empire is a bit silly unless you're talking about the East India Company. I don't believe Facebook has its own warships yet.

It feels inevitable we're going to end up spraying sulfate into the air to keep cool, because that's by far the cheapest solution to global warming.

It also doesn't fix any of the fundamental problems.

Maybe a sign of (rather unintelligent) industrialized life on other planets would be sulfate aerosol spectra in the atmosphere too consistent to be explained by vulcanism...