"Idle hands are the devil's workshop." The more people that are economically sidelined, who nave nothing to do and no prospects for self-advancement, the more appealing radical ideologies will become and the more social unrest there will be. A major source of social cohesion is the belief that if you work hard you will be able to succeed, but if it's structurally impossible to find work, and all you have is a UBI which doesn't afford much, you can expect that mass stagnation to provide ample breeding ground for a colorful assortment of social ills--drug abuse, suicide, crime, and finally, once the individual angst finds collective expression and organization, revolts and political radicalization.
Work is one of the major sources of purpose people have. Earning an income and putting food on the table is fundamental to one's self-respect. Like educational achievement, it gives the impression that there is some way to advance beyond your lot. Take that away and it will cause a mass existential crisis unless there is something to fill the void. All the blights of the rust belt and other economically overlooked areas should be expected to spread.
This seems plausible. There's usually a proliferation then a consolidation phase with any period of innovation, where people invent all sorts of ways of doing things and then gradually figure out what works best together.
Why the client-side has seen such an era of fecundity in recent years is beyond me. Perhaps because there was a real problem with leaving the job to jquery. Regardless, eventually there's just going to be too many available solutions but not enough solidified and proven methods where everything you need has been packaged together neatly because trial and error and years of iteration have pulled the optimal toolchains together and left the others by the wayside.
The way everything client oriented is just sort of floating around with no real scheme to it creates a lot of possibilities but at the same time much confusion and exhaustion. Eventually, (hopefully) there will come the standards.
There's something in human nature that finds meaning in turbulence, friction, conflict, movement. A sense of being challenged, pushing past limits, propelling into
excitement and change. When you reach a state where you have all your needs met and don't need to go any further, there still remains a sense that there's more left undone. Comfort can be equated with stagnation. It's a Nietzschean notion. A will-to-danger (not to sound too crazy). There's a sense of being domesticated that adds a subtle discomfort to the comfort.
I've worked blue collar and white collar jobs, and it was the blue collar jobs that made me feel more alive, because I was around dangerous tools, hazards, and actuating my body like it was supposed to be outside exposed to the elements. I went home after and my rest felt deserved and truly regenerative, like my body was drinking it in. The white collar work, though it pays better and offers more comfort and is more cognitively demanding, feels at the same time too breezy, too safe.
It seems like a really stupid argument, that things can be bad because they're too good, affluenza and so on, but there's something to it.
I think OP means that idealizing ML experiments using contrived data can distort the picture. Real world, ecologically valid results can only be discovered as they emerge when the algorithms are deployed in production. ML algorithms sometimes cook up solutions that can surprise or even disturb their creators.
I'm not sure I exactly agree with this premise. If you read about the principles of chaos engineering, (https://principlesofchaos.org/) it's possible to simulate real world events in testing. And if there's a rigorous mathematical backbone to ML as there clearly is, some determinations about its limitations should be universal for all cases, even if the emergent results in production are unpredictable and could range over intractably many possible outcomes.
Another risk I think is the automation of coding. It already happens all the time, and in principle coding should be the most automatable of anything. The only thing saving it is that it's very hard to automate the creation of good ideas or purposeful human intentions, which naturally inform most successful coding projects. There's also a bit of a conflict of interest, why would coders building automation systems want to automate themselves out of existence? I think these rationales protect software developers' job security for the near to mid-term future.
I'm also thinking that how people code could change drastically, but even so, that's less of a problem. Because the rules and logic of any programming language boil down to fundamental computer science principles which should remain constant despite the interface you're using to code, whether it's a keyboard and monitor or some kind of visual drag and drop thing or whatever someone comes up with.
Right, web apps aren't websites. The distinction is pretty sharp when you move from a simple static old fashioned display to Amazon tier complexity where money is being transacted, log in information stored, orders updated, and a million more things besides.
The big question is if the internet and its primary portals, the desktop browser and the smartphone, will reach the end of their tether. The only thing I could see replacing it is neurotechnology of some sort, and that seems so far off and so difficult to commercialize that it's not something web developers need to worry about any time soon. Or perhaps quantum computing becomes commercially viable and simply shoves digital computing aside, negating the need for those skills completely.
Another alternative is that the web radically changes unforeseeably and new practices instantly antiquate everything people are learning now, which is a more frustrating and realistic possibility and also something that is bound to happen. Given how difficult it can be for many people to learn these skills, and given how much knowledge one must integrate to be a productive developer, this is an upsetting potentiality and one that is bound to happen eventually.
Not every field carries these risks. Law practice isn't going to change fundamentally in the coming decades. And some aspects of coding can be exhausting and demoralizing to learn. Past generations of coders have had their skill sets rendered null and void and it will probably happen again at some point to this generation.
>Even though eye beams do not exist in reality, and even though most people do not intellectually believe in them, they may exist as a part of the rich, implicit social model that we naturally apply to seeing agents.
It makes sense that people would attempt to reconstruct a model or theory of mind from scant cues based on other's gazes. In many contexts, such as encountering strangers, you don't have anything else to work with, and so the importance is on leveraging what you can.
It's also something that even if eye beams or extramissons have no empirical reality, the concept of them can still be utilized in representations of other's minds. It reminds me of Zizek's interest in the "reality of the virtual" that is, even things that aren't empirically real but are merely conceived can have real world impacts.
I agree that the government will need to work on a transparent front-end to make this data universally accessible. Nonprofits without the budgets for advanced tech workers and without volunteers will need clearly organized links to download. They may not know how to do shell scripting.
The more data everyone can use, rather than data that can be owned and commoditized or utilized only by specialists is a good thing.
It's good to see the US govt making an effort to step up its technical level. A vast if hidden problem in the political sphere is that most politicians do not have a technical education. This creates a serious misconfiguration of the govt alongside other centers of soft power like large cap tech companies.
There is no way around it that these companies have to work with the government to secure public interests from 21st century threats. Just today I read an article about how black hat hackers are targeting outdated industrial control systems more vigorously than ever before. The government on its own without technical upgrades cannot face down this problem in its current condition. Which is why opening up data is a beneficial thing.
Openness of data is a double edged sword. It will make malicious agents' job easier to have as much data as possible in a consistently machine readable format, but it will also help those on the other side.
If tech is one of the things that can bolster and improve government, tech needs to work in the optimal environment. Which is one with open data.
If humanlike reasoning is the destination for AGI, there's more than just symbolic reasoning to factor in. Emotions are a huge control on human reasoning.
People essentially rely on emotions to make all their decisions. Emotions implicitly represent rapid-fire unconscious decision work.
Again the current popular understanding of the mind separates emotion from thinking. They are not distinct. Emotional processing is another kind of thinking, and it drives the show.
If you want AGI you need to give it a world to live in. The ecological component of perception is missing. Without full senses, a machine doesn't have a world to think generally about. It just has the narrow subdomain of inputs that it is able to process.
You could bet that AGI won't manifest until AI and robotics are properly fused. Cognition does not happen in a void. This image of a purely rational mind floating in an abyss is an outdated paradigm to which many in the AI community still cling. Instead, the body and environment become incorporated into the computation.
I'm conflicted about the notion that "no one has time to read your article." That says more about dilapidation of reading culture than the fact that length of a text is necessarily bad. I see it happening to me and I don't read something not because it is valueless on its own but because there is simply too much else outside of it drawing on my attention.
If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'll say nothing. If you say everything, nobody will read it unless they have eyes set on your work.
Most people seem to be trained to write an expository piece in a classical model of assert a premise => provide an argument => yield a conclusion. They're not used to putting the conclusion where the premise should be sort of like an abstract.
My assumption, my hope really, is that FB gave away private messages in some sanitized and anonymized manner, because Spotify and Netflix was happy to pay for any insider marketing data they could receive about what relevant chat histories have to say about music or movies.
NYT seems to be on the attack against FB out of some ideological motivation but the details they are presenting leaves out contextual information about how the data was processed before it was handed off.
There's no question FB has been nothing but elusive and ink-spraying about this whole set of ordeals. It's one level of uncomfortable if FB is simply handing away sanitized data, it's another thing if you can just pay them and they will give you all the private posts of any given user without any sort of identity protection.
The fact of the matter is FB's terms basically allow them absolute possession of whatever data you give them. So there is so much grey area and legal ambiguity that it has been allowed to work with, especially in the US which matters most for a US company.
Europe has come around to the concept of citizen's rights to their own data. In some countries you can't even use websites unless they inform you they store cookies. At the end of the day, it's your responsibility who you give your data to.
Any blog IMO should have a minimalist design. You want to draw attention to the content and present it as plainly and with as little visual clutter as possible.
Some people want to use their blog as a kind of interactive CV but that should be treated as a separate project, as it will just introduce more clutter.
Is that a feature or a byproduct? It doesn't make sense to me on the surface that a larger text would be linked to more necessarily.
The length of a text doesn't seem like it would factor into the outcome of the page ranking unless I'm missing something.
How would you determine what is a "good" or "bad" article, given a reader's preferences rather than one that simply gets associated most regularly with a search query?
I would argue your perspective boils down to what is the best standard way to teach programming skills. No one should stop learning from as many valid sources as possible. And it's not an easy problem for anyone to solve.
The underlying issue with the problem is that there is probably no one size fits all approach. Individual variability might as well be immeasurable. The best you can do is put out as much valid information and schemas as you have in approach to a solution to the problem. Tricks of the trade, heuristics, best practices. A full fledged scientific understanding of how the brain assimilates coding knowledge hasn't been established. It may not even be known if our knowledge of the brain is adequate enough to begin that research.
As the history of computing has changed over the decades, the nature of coding changed as well. More and more abstraction has been layered and now it's easier to code than it ever has been. It's like all these macros have been set up so that the programmer only has to work at one level.
Google is naturally going to promote its own system, but it is not Google's responsibility or role to claim to present some final statement on how to approach it.
Regardless, so much knowledge that used to be stored only in people's heads has been offloaded onto software, and the nature and requirements of coding have changed with it.
On top of it all there may simply be too much of it (computer science, mathematics, programming languages) for any single individual to learn it all in a strict completist sense.
Tinder has one of those monetization schemes that transparently resemble operant conditioning to anyone with the knowhow. Captology.
The more you use it, the more it knows your type, the more it recommends them, then it dangles out more possibilities that are just beyond reach but could be accessible if you just throw money at it.
The prospect of matching with someone you find very desirable keeps you swiping, making you more likely to do it in the future.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily unethical, but it is clearly an example of a knowledge-based power imbalance. Because I am quite sure the majority of Tinder users are unaware of all the machinations behind the curtains.
This sequence of exposes and revelations doesn't speak to Facebook's credibility. It would be one thing if it was just the incidents surrounding the 2016 elections, but the pattern in all these news reports seems to be that Facebook's design doesn't simply doesn't respect its users.
Too many features and plugins Facebook has seem to be leaky in some respect. Messanger does not use default end-to-end encryption for whatever mysterious reason. If Facebook owns the endpoints, it can just as easily obtain the data for themselves before encrypting and submitting the message if it were enabled anyway.
How could I have any faith Facebook doesn't collect messages intended to be sent in confidence if collecting them suits Facebook's purposes?
I'm not sure however if Facebook's sketchiness is intentional or not. We have few examples of companies that were early movers in the inception days of the modern internet. And the decisions made early on prefigured everything that was to come.
At this time I would look to other others for inspiration about the correct way to make use of a data jackpot. Facebook's own totally unrestricted laissez-faire mentality in the relentless pursuit and utilization of its data is undermining itself.
I'd like to see what can be done with anonymity but with more filters. When this software was first designed, AI-driven content classification was virtually nonexistent.
If bots can be designed to be moderators, I'm thinking if you were to fuse that functionality to an anonymous data storage, you would be able to ensure only productive content enters storage, and content that is irrelevant can be excluded. Of course that bot would need to know precisely what it should exclude from storage which seems hard to define.
It makes me wonder about use cases for tools like freenet, tor, etc. Espionage of some sort comes to mind and the need to deliver a message from sender to receiver without identifying any participants . Otherwise there is some other implicit recognition that anonymity can be productive.
Anonymity clearly changes how individuals communicate, but the research I know of tends to focus more on how people like to behave badly and mischievously when there is no known reputation or name associated with the consequences of a action.
Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows the ability to obscure identity, however thin or unsophisticated, elicits changes in behavior. I highly doubt the producers of these tools construct them with the goal of inviting mayhem in mind. Regardless, the more anonymous a data transfer is, the less social pressure there is to communicate within certain permitted boundaries.
Outside of a authority point of view, there's also the potential for creativity and free association related to anonymity. If one feels you won't be judged because of saying something, you might open up.
Work is one of the major sources of purpose people have. Earning an income and putting food on the table is fundamental to one's self-respect. Like educational achievement, it gives the impression that there is some way to advance beyond your lot. Take that away and it will cause a mass existential crisis unless there is something to fill the void. All the blights of the rust belt and other economically overlooked areas should be expected to spread.