Posts by Filippo 1909 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Nov 2007
That, and the human cashier is faster. I mean, he has to do exactly the same things that you have to do at the self-checkout, but he does it eight hours a day and is therefore vastly more efficient - and the same applies to every customer in line in front of you. Unless there's a much longer line at the cashier, in which case his job is probably safe, you're probably better off waiting there.
I'm no expert on FE. I hope I'm not talking complete rubbish here.
Automated analysis is usually much worse than expert analysis. However, that would be comparing apples and oranges.
The purpose of automated analysis is not to replace expert analysis. Rather, it is to be applied on a massive scale, typically several orders of magnitude larger than what you could have humans do - e.g. check every single tree every day. At that point, its results are still individually crap, but they become statistically useful.
You can use that data to inform your decision on where to invest your limited expert analysis resources, in such a way that they are statistically more likely to go where there's a problem.
If your subjects number in the millions, such as in this case, then even piss-poor automation can make a very large difference. Prioritize citizen reports, but after that, you send the few experts you have to the trees that the computer say look bad. Even if the computer is wrong nine times out of ten, it's still better than checking trees at random, because a random tree will be fine far more than 90% of times.
Yes, the computer might not flag a sick tree at all, and you might not send an expert there because of this, and people might get hurt because of this. But, well, this can and does happen with no computer involved. Because you'll never have enough experts to have expert monitoring of all of them at all times. So it's all a probabilities game. The automated analysis just weighs the dice a bit more in your favor, that's all.
Whenever I read about low-code or no-code, I find that all of the praise comes from the people who are making these platforms, or, sometimes, from people who are tinkering with them, or learning to use them, or planning to use them.
Praise from people who actually use them in production is conspicuosly absent.
I also notice a remarkable number of caveats about things it doesn't replace, and not very many mentions of things it does replace.
Agree. I mean, I'm happy that they'll get rid of a stupid annoying rule, but I really don't see the connection with CT scanners.
It sounds to me like they want to get rid of the rule because the queues at security checks are getting intolerable and they know it's pointless anyway, but they need some kind of justification.
Let's get something out of the way: I'm in favor of this, and I'm generally in favor of any attempt to contribute to solving the energy problem. I do not like comments on the line of "they should be doing X instead", because I think that we ought to deploy all credible solutions, aggressively and at the same time.
That said, what about decommissioning? This is a site full of hazardous chemicals, that don't have an infinite useful lifespan, and the recycling of which is not yet working perfectly. Has decommissioning been factored in? We make quite a big deal of it when talking about nuclear; it seems only fair that we should talk about it in the context of other energy-related technologies too.
> Adaptive cruise control already solves this pretty well.
I use ACC all the time. I wish others did too. As things stand now, people keep overtaking me to get into my safety distance. Then, because they are not actually going any faster (my car was going at the current speed of traffic just like every other), the car has to slow down in order to regain safety distance. And the cycle resumes. Given that overtaking is relatively dangerous, this is... not optimal.
The low-hanging fruit would be keeping a proper safety distance and never cutting off, which gives room to minimize braking. That in turn avoids creating a "red wave" behind you.
Given that the article also describes a system where the cars talk to each other, I would guess that they also increase safety distance when they know that traffic is slowing down up ahead. This would allow the slow wave from the slow traffic to dissipate faster.
They probably also avoid braking hard when they know that the driver ahead is not actually braking hard. Humans can't know that, so we always have to err on the side of braking harder than needed.
Here's the thing.
Suppose I want to buy a gizmo on Amazon. There are a hundred different gizmo brands, and they are sold by a thousand different sellers. Because of this, deciding exactly which gizmo I'm going to buy is not trivial.
If I'm on the website, I can enter 'gizmo' in the search box, then flag a few checkboxes to refine my search, and then scan 20 results.
If I'm on Alexa, I can ask for a gizmo, and then what? What's the voice UX equivalent of reading the filter options and deciding which ones I want to flag? Do I just start qualifying my desired gizmo, without knowing what attributes Amazon's back end is actually capable of searching? Do I listen to an enormous list of flags, and then enunciate the ones I want to activate? How long is that going to take, even in the best case?
When I finally manage to get results, what's the UX equivalent of scanning the list with my eyeballs? Do I listen to the title of each entry? Title + price? Title + price + avg user review? Again, how long is that going to take, even in the best case?
Or is the idea that the AI in Alexa's backend will be able to figure out exactly what I want, just because it knows me so well? Okay, but if that was feasible, then why does the website consistently return tons of irrelevant results in searches? And that's on the website, where I can provide much clearer query parameters. Why would I trust it to work any better by voice? Am I supposed to just say "confirm order" and pray that it has picked a gizmo that's mostly what I want? Not gonna happen.
Alexa as a shopping assistant might, just might, start making sense, when the website search starts working not just "good", but "almost miraculously". Only then it might make sense to attempt a voice shopping assistant.
It's a complicated question, because there's a wide variety of gamers. Some don't play the latest games. Some get the bare minimum hardware required to play the latest games at minimum settings. Some want to play the latest games at top settings. Each of these points of power requirement is constantly inching forward, but not always at the same rate. Also, it's not specific to games; the power requirement of every commercial software is constantly inching forward. Nobody's office PC is a 486 today, even though they were office PCs in the 90s.
From the point of view of developers, there's a lot of tension between wanting to have the lowest requirements possible, so that you can sell to people who spec at the lower end, and wanting to have the best quality possible, so that you look at least as good as your competitors.
So, complicated question, with no straightforward answer.
> Every bank and payment scheme becomes unavailable
Pardon the french, but wtf are you saying? I've been happily using my cc and bank account and everything else throughout every financial crisis in the last four decades. I have not had any interruption at all. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
First of all, like 99%+ of conspiracy theories, you are assuming that every single one of literally hundreds if not thousands of people are going to maintain a viciously complicated coverup perfectly. That's just not gonna happen.
Secondly, but more interestingly, you are misunderstanding what "Too Big To Fail" means. A company is not "Too Big To Fail" because there's no replacement. There are plenty of investment banks, insurance companies, and such. They wouldn't all fail even in an extreme event, and those that survive would be happy to pick up all the new customers.
A company is "Too Big To Fail" because it has too much debt (or otherwise has too many other entities depending on it). Then, if it fails, lots of other companies (who would otherwise be healthy) suddenly find their credits vanish into a poof of bankruptcy. If the original company was small, they can refinance and take a relatively small hit. If it was huge, though, lots of people will want to refinance at the same time. Which will drive costs way up. Some of these businesses may fail because of this, leaving other companies in the same situation, in a chain reaction that can easily kill tons of businesses that don't even do finance, they do real stuff, and would otherwise actually be healthy and doing fine.
Please note, because this is the point, that the above scenario does not talk about payment schemes. Payment schemes have nothing to do with it at all. You could be paying cash, electronic, crypto, barter, whatever, it doesn't matter; the way debt is moved is just a technicality. If everyone used bitcoin, you would still have fat too-big-to-fail investment banks. They'd even be the same investment banks. The moment someone needs a loan to finance their brilliant new great idea, the ball starts rolling, it doesn't matter whether they get dollars or bitcoins.
Wait, I can hear it already... "But you can't create bitcoins arbitrarily out of nothing, so you can never have excessive debt!": nope, that won't work. The second someone says "I'll give you x btc next month", which you can't prevent people from doing, you have debt. Everything else - excessive leverage, nasty derivatives, the whole shebang - can, and will be, built on top of that. Already has been, in fact. Hence: FTX.
Just face it - there's nothing revolutionary in crypto. It's just a way to make payments without having to trust anyone. That's clever, but executing payments is not really a big problem, hasn't been in a while. The really big problems in finance have nothing to do with it, so a clever way of executing payments won't do anything to solve them.
> And this company was valued at $32 billion.
I believe that's the main lesson to be learned, right there.
The efficient functioning of capitalism is based on the market being able to make educated guesses on the future performance of companies. They don't have to be great guesses, but they do have to at least make sense.
In this case, the market valuation was completely and utterly bonkers. In the light of Ray's assessment, FTX was actually a dumpster fire and had always been a dumpster fire.
Now, I get that retail investors will be taken in by shiny and won't do any due diligence before investing. But, equity funds? Real banks? Insurance companies? Those guys really ought to notice when a company's governance is either a mess, or deliberately opaque to hide the fact that it's a mess.
Which means that the only reason they invest is speculation - i.e., they don't really believe the company is worth that, but they hope they'll be able to sell at a higher price before the crash.
Which, don't get me wrong, makes a lot of sense if you can pull it off; nobody is in this for altruism.
However, it is not efficient market functioning. Quite the opposite. Total value decreases as the algorithm allocates massive resources to utterly useless work.
I really hope that, one day, some genius in the field of economics figures out how to prevent this, without also breaking the good bits that really work.
In the mean time, though, I'd settle for some decent regulation of the whole mess, and for certain people to stop believing in markets and hating regulation as if they were in some kind of cult.
Sort of. It's true that high energy density and safety are always conflicting requirements, but there isn't a hard limit that we know of. Perpetual motion, or energy from water, OTOH, are outright impossible. These things should not be lumped in the same bucket. Claims about innovative batteries need to be looked at with healthy skepticism; claims about perpetual motion don't even need to be looked at.
Why would I be talking about the US alone?
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries
3500 deaths per day. So, yeah, thousands.
The possibility of dangerous remote car hijack very much should be factored in, when figuring out ADAS accident rate. I don't think it's going to move the scales very much, though. 3500 per day is a big number.
That's the point, yeah. ADAS is worth using for me if its accident rate is less than my own non-ADAS accident rate.
Problem is, nobody knows any of the numbers there. I don't know what my own non-ADAS accident rate is, beyond "low", because I don't have enough samples. I believe I am a good driver, but it's well known that everyone overestimates their driving skills.
I also don't know what the ADAS accident rate is, but that's more annoying, because whereas my own numbers are mathematically unknowable due to not enough samples, ADAS numbers should in principle be possible to have with some confidence. But we still don't have them.
Which leads me to conclude that I have to agree with you: with this much smoke, ADAS needs to actually be overwhelmingly better than average, in order for me to be able to be certain that it is at least somewhat better than average. I won't use a system that's "quite a bit better than a drunken madman". Actually, just like everyone else, I believe I'm a solidly better than average driver, so I won't even use a system that's "somewhat better than average". It doesn't take much to get to requiring 10x better, yeah.
The only bit I disagree with is that it's better to die by own stupidity than by a computer's, because my own stupidity is preventable. Yes, it's all preventable, but no, statistically, it doesn't all get prevented. That number can be made very low by careful driving, but it's not zero and only a fool would pretend it's zero. It is a positive number, which could in principle be compared to another positive number. The color of the dice I'm about to roll doesn't really matter.
The very short version of this: yeah, I agree with you, but what if autonomous vehicles were already 10x better? I don't think they are, but if/when they will be, I still won't know, because the damn numbers are not available anywhere.
We do know that people will die without ADAS. People die in non-ADAS accidents by the thousands each day, I don't think anyone doubts that. Statistically, people die both with or without ADAS. Individually, people might die with or without ADAS.
The big question is whether the chances for an accident are better with or without ADAS. AFAIK, there's still not a truly reliable source with an answer to that.
FWIW, the Covid app by Bending Spoons was surprisingly well done. It had a straightforward GUI, it didn't drain my battery, it didn't pester me with pointless notifications, it was open source and it didn't shift any of my personal data outside the phone. I think it even did a decent job of tracking who was near me, from looking at the files it accumulated, although I can't be sure because (see above) it took privacy seriously. It still failed, of course, but that was for... other reasons; from a technical standpoint, it was quite a bit better than I expected.
> And, of course, once the network effect is no longer working *for* you, it works *against* you. Strongly.
Bingo. Exponentials work both ways. When things go bad in a social network, they go bad hard and fast. The user base is also the user value. Once users start leaving, the value of the network for other users goes down. So they leave. So the value goes further down. So more users leave. And soon you're left with a wind-blasted wasteland.
Case in point: .NET Compact. Millions of decades-old devices out there, where the only .NET you have is that - and it works pretty well. However, how do you build an app targeting it? A VS no later than VS 2008. So every time I put together a new work machine, I have to install VS 2008, then cast a whole bunch of arcane spells to make it play nice with the rest of the environment, and pray that everything still works. And every single moving part in this problem is Microsoft. And I say this as a staunch .NET supporter.
A good part of the problem is that when we talk the costs of nuclear, we are very keenly accounting anything and everything, and then some. Which is good and proper.
However, when we talk the costs of fossils, we are completely ignoring all externalities. Waste gases are dumped into the atmosphere, millions of people get cancer from particulates and stuff, the entire global climate gets screwed up, and none of this has ever been factored into the costs of fossil power.
This is... bad, really bad. It's as if we had set up a whole ecosystem of nuclear power, and then just dumped radioactive waste into people's backyards, handled decommissioning by giving the building a paint job and converting it into a public pool, and handled major accidents by asking the janitor to give it a really good sweep next wednesday. I bet nuclear power would become really cheap then, maybe even "too cheap to meter". But we don't want that, it would be insane.
But we somehow ended up having exactly that situation for fossils.
By that criterion, any criticism of any nation's policy would be called racist. That can't work. If "X threatens to invade Y" can be dismissed as racist, I can't see any way to have a meaningful conversation about international relationships - ever. Racism targets people, not policies.
They do, sometimes. It's still called "funding", as in "this tax cut will be funded by slashing the welfare budget".
At some point, the reason tax cuts have to be funded is, well, simple arithmetic. The money has to come from somewhere. There are some ways to create money out of nowhere (with a whole lot of caveats), but such creation would still need to be documented and tracked, and such tracking would be the funding of whatever you then spend the money on.
I'm not sure what a "not-funded" tax cut would be in practice, but I figure it would be funded by deficit spending.
It's interesting that the article mentions Pokemon Go as the application that brought AR into the mainstream.
Lots and lots of people played that particular game, and I assume at least some are still playing, but the hype period seems to have passed. What has it left in its wake? Has any other AR game exceeded, or even just replicated, Pokemon Go's success? I don't think so, at least I'm not hearing about it. In fact, is there any other AR application that has been as successful as Pokemon Go? Again, not that I've heard of. Many games, many applications, sure, but by and large I'm getting the impression that Pokemon Go was an especially big AR wave that came... and went.
I think this is telling. For a while, AR stood on the shoulders of a well-designed killer app and highly-recognized brand. But after those factors got old, it went back to being a niche. To me, this suggests that AR, as of now, is not really a concept that people want and that you can build on. Rather, it seems to be something that needs support from elsewhere, in order to stand.
I mostly read mainstream newspapers, and I don't recall any particular hand-wringing. Azov neo-nazis made the news, and it's a topic that got discussed even during the war.
It's not front page news, and it shouldn't be. Banging on and on about a small minority of loud neo-nazis, something that plenty of Western countries also have, now that would have been propaganda - and of course Kremlin-influenced sources do bang on and on about them. But in reality, Azov couldn't even win a single seat in Parliament, not even by allying themselves with other nutjobs. They are worth looking into every now and then, but that's pretty much it.
Thinking for even a second that Azov justifies Russian claims, or that mainstream media is "hiding" Azov just because it's not on the front page, now that is falling for propaganda.
> I suspect this hell has been caused by beancounters who don't understand their market. It's been coming for a long time.
I suspect the same thing. Far too many businesses have been squeezing everything they could possibly squeeze, in a process that has been hailed in glory and variously called "being efficient", "having a lean supply chain", "no-inventory model", "being able to rapidly adapt" and so on and so forth.
In reality, they were just basically bundling up the company's ability to withstand shocks, and selling it for a quick buck. If everyone does it, then entire value chains become like chunks of rigid materials stacked up one against the other: there's nothing elastic that can absorb the shock, so the shock goes right through the whole lot.
And when the shit eventually hits the fan, the managers who made those short-sighted decisions will be gone anyway. Even if they aren't gone, they'll just claim the shit was completely unpredictable, and they can't possibly be at fault, because after all if you see a trend for five years, it's guaranteed to go on forever, right? Right?
Unfortunately, taking short-sighted decisions really does boost your company in the short term. If all of your competitors do it, and the market manages to avoid shocks for a few years, eventually you will be forced to do it too, or get squeezed out.
> His companies have already contributed far more to Ukraine than most others.
That's a bit of a paradox in the perception of charity. If you donate to charity, and then stop, you get far more shit thrown at you than someone who never donated to begin with.
I'm not even talking about Musk specifically, and also Musk is a weird special case in many ways; it's a generalized problem with how society perceives charity.
See also, for example, Bill Gates - funds charity projects with enormous amounts of money, and gets a lot of flak either because they are not the "right" projects, or because he still has enormous amounts of money yet, or because it's perceived to be just a PR stunt. These might be good points, if not for the fact that, meanwhile, there are other hyper-rich out there who never donated a single dollar, and yet they hardly get criticism for that, if ever.
This is problematic, because it's a disincentive to donating, and an incentive to just staying out of the public eye and enjoying your money.
Because this sort of stuff is how you figure out exactly how biological neurons really work, at a biochemical level. That, in turn, is how you, eventually, many years and a whole lot of research later, figure out how to fix brain disease, fix traumatic nerve injuries, make brain-machine interfaces, and so on and so forth.
Bingo: if you really want to impact child abuse, make it easier for kids to figure out something is wrong and reach out. It's hard to do that while there are groups that don't want any topic that has anything remotely to do with sex getting discussed within a mile of any kid anywhere, though.
> "If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear!"
Which makes about as much sense as saying that you shouldn't be mad if someone points a gun at you, as long as he doesn't shoot.
A core principle of democracy ought to be that positions of power need to be well justified, not just exertion of power. By grabbing someone's data, you enter a position of power over him. This is already problematic, regardless of whether you do something with that data or not.
Basically, being denied hiding is in itself something we should fear.
To extend the metaphor... in order for me to get shot, a gun needs to be carried in my presence, drawn, have its safety removed, pointed, and triggered. Every additional step that gets taken in that sequence is an additional, escalating threat. It is not true that no such step is a threat until the last one.
Similarly, every single step that facilitates an abuse of power is in itself a threat. Sometimes they are needed, but every such step needs individually strong justification, before it can be allowed to happen. And simply "because I might later need to do the subsequent steps" is a terrible, terrible justification.
Let me get this straight.
Someone claims that 5G does a bad thing. At which point one of three things can happen:
⁕ Nobody checks ⇒ we assume the bad thing is true.
⁕ Somebody checks, and finds the bad thing to be true ⇒ we know the bad thing is true.
⁕ Somebody checks, and finds the bad thing to be false ⇒ we assume the guy who checked was corrupt, so the check is invalid, so we still assume the bad thing is true.
Exactly how do you disprove the claim? You have to check yourself? That's tricky to do with aircraft, and even if you did, by the above logic you couldn't convince anyone else anyway...
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