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قبل شهرينdiscuss

I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.

قبل شهرينdiscuss

That was my immediate first thought. "Oh, is Bitlocker Not Safe Anymore?"

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

'Make game of that which makes as much of thee' is some ancient wisdom. This sort of behavior by Google certainly does justify providing no more than a 12 hour window to Google to fix problems under responsible disclosure. Many in the industry are unhappy with Google only giving companies 90 days with Project Zero as they feel that large corporations should be given preferential and deferential treatment (they are people after all), but when it comes to app developers 12 hours is acceptable? I think not. Those who wish to set the rules must be willing to play by the same.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

And will continue to do so because anyone who wants to create a new browser will be locked out of supporting EME by Google as we've already seen happen a couple times. Then once they get rid of the address bar and URLs, the only way to find anything on the web will be through a search which Google happens to also dominate in.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

Why is a very lightweight 15" laptop out of the realm of possibility? It's not like displays today are inherently heavy. If OLED panels become viable for notebooks, they weigh nearly nothing, but even with existing LCDs with LED backlighting, those don't weigh much either. They do need to pay attention to making the case rigid across a larger area, but that ought to be possible without adding too much weight given modern materials. The LG Gram 15 only weighs 1.1kg, for instance.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

They just said '2-3 weeks' to give themselves some cover at first I think. On the day of its announcement they said 2-3 weeks. When I actually registered to send mine in a week or two later, it said 5 days. And it took maybe 5 days (I wasn't really paying that much attention, I don't use my MBP all that often) from when fedex picked it up to when they dropped it off with the battery replaced. It was actually quite a pleasant experience all things considered. Only gripe I really had about it was that the support person I chatted with when registering my system for the repair requested I use the system to do multiple things (add a separate administrative user for them to use if necessary, log out of iCloud, deactivate system in iTunes, etc). When you tell me not to use a system at all because it is in danger of bursting into flames at any moment, I'm not a big fan of then being told to use it to prep for sending it in...

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

>I'm not aware of any better easily measurable metric

Why should an easily measurable metric which has meaningful value exist? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should at all. Determining the capability of a researcher is inherently a very complex intellectual task. The desire is to reduce that task to something which removes the need for the person doing the evaluation to read and understand the produced research, or to even understand the field of study in many cases. Perhaps, instead, those who are put in charge of things like awarding grant funding, granting tenure at universities, and deciding who to hire to teach ought to be expected and required to evaluate the research on its merits. This would greatly increase the intellectual sophistication and capability needed for people in those positions, but the alternative will always be fairly easily exploitable because it is easier to goose a metric than to do solid research.

We see the shortcomings of trying to reduce complex intellectual challenges to checklists or metrics all the time. And we simply ignore the alternative of relying upon intellectually capable people meeting the challenge. Personally, I don't understand why.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

If you try to reduce a complex intellectual task to a metric or a checklist, you are begging for exploitation.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

Fair Use is specifically an affirmative defense. Not a defense like self-defense at all. It's not a matter of 'yes I did a bad, but I had a good reason', but 'it is my right to do this, I did nothing wrong'. The other references to Lenz v Universal in this thread established this and it's been upheld in many courts.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

The problem is, in the USA at least, there is a legal right to Fair Use of copyrighted works. Analysis of Fair Use issues is not simple and is impossible to automate. Music companies have been consistently breaking the law with their claims. The law requires them to do a proper Fair Use analysis prior to lodging any complaint under the DMCA. While it might be possible for Google to automate removal of a given scrap of music from a video, and providing that as an option to the music companies as an alternative to blocking the entire video or disabling monetization might be a good idea, it leaves a few problems on the table. Music companies would still be legally obligated to perform proper Fair Use analysis on every single video they do this to. Additionally, there is no such thing as a central copyright registry that Google could use to verify that the people filing the claims have any right. Googles systems can be, and actively are, abused. It's the sort of situation that I imagine Google really dislikes, as the law in this area is basically impossible to automate. So, they will probably just automate destruction of Fair Use because the groups most likely impacted have fewer resources to fight it.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

Any centralized identity system solves a problem we don't have. It doesn't simply serve to identify a person. It serves to aggregate an identity and tie together extremely disparate and unrelated data. It enables a data leak or abuse to not just compromise one service, but all of them at once. If there is a leak of data from, say, a dating site that involves dumping the public keys of the users alongside the user activity associated with it, then the credit card company and electric company and water company and the gaming forum you signed up for and multitudes of other utterly unrelated organizations now have the ability to correlate your dating activity with your activity on their service. The identities on all of those separate systems being the same identity is the problem a centralized system solves. And it's a problem we have never had.

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

I had a thought awhile back. In the vast majority of uses, identity is exactly the issue. Yet in the vast majority of compromises or problems, the problem is correlation and combination of data. By this I mean it seems to me that, say, the Social Security Administration needs to be able to identify a citizen in order to know whether and how much they need to pay a person of a certain identity to avoid paying the wrong amount, the wrong person, double-paying, etc. There does not need to exist an identity which spreads beyond that. Your credit card company does not need to use the same identity and a unique identity which functions solely within the context of the credit card account is all that is needed. Instead, we have identities that get spread across multiple services even though there is never any actual need to relate or correlate the activity across those services. This seems like the sort of situation that cryptography can solve, although obviously there would be a lot of usability work to be done. But it seems to me that cryptographically unrelatable distinct identities which has only 1 possible point of aggregation (you) is what is needed.

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

Lots of things we see as innocuous online would seem really weird, clingy, abusive in other contexts. Imagine if every time you walked into a store before you even looked at anything someone steps up right into your face and says "Sign up for our newsletter!" Then you walk two steps and someone steps up to you with a phone in their hand "Hey, call your friends and tell them you love our store! We'll give you 5% off!" then a couple steps later a marketer comes up to you "Hey, our advertising department wants your phone number so they can call you up and just say something to you a few times a day!"

I just want to buy a damn pillow! (Don't forget to review it, your opinion is important to the world! And the manufacturer would like to know how useful it was to you but won't do anything if it wasn't!)

قبل 12 سنةdiscuss

And that shame only comes about because they do not have the shelter of crying "I was only doing my job!" or "I was only following orders!"

Give a person that shelter and they can become the most horrific monster imaginable, with no moral compunction whatsoever. They abdicate all moral responsibility for themselves. That is why "just following orders" or "just doing my job" should be seen as a guarantee of moral bankruptcy and deserving of the most extreme punishment. If you take advantage of those shelters and abdicate your own moral sense, you are a dangerous uncivilized animal and should be locked in a cage for the protection of the rest of society.

قبل 12 سنةdiscuss

That would be a radically dangerous position to adopt. It is exactly the position which fueled colonialism. They thought they had grown up as well and were in a position to 'help' the rest of humanity grow with them - into being driven primarily by economic motives dedicated to suppressing every counter-productive urge to pleasure that humans experience.

And, of course, the Holocaust was supported by this exact argument as well. We'd developed enough that we knew how to improve the human race - eugenics. We knew how to improve 'mental hygeine'. All that was required was hard men making the hard choices, overcoming the weaknesses of empathy and compassion for the greater good. And the people lapped it up. That is a dangerous area to tread upon. We should always be humble in our knowledge, and parsimonious in its application.

قبل 12 سنةdiscuss

I see no reason why an intelligent system couldn't learn common synonyms. It would be a pain to do on an exclusively local system, but on a networked system it could trade tags with others and learn these synonyms. You might call yours 'photos' while I call mine 'images'. When I transfer a file from you to me, it would be able to translate the tags into my own personal folksonomy. Which would be more convenient than the current situation where I have to rename and integrate into my filesystem every file I download from you.

قبل 12 سنةdiscuss

I think this will be the way storage goes in the future. With the introduction of memristor-based storage which is both non-volatile and as fast as DRAM and cheaper to produce than mechanical drives, the need to distinguish between 'in memory' and 'on disk' becomes a great deal less important. The distinction which becomes important then is 'what is the user likely to need next'.