The real shocker is that it took until 2012 for this pivotal algorithm to win a Nobel Prize. David Gale had passed by then! The Nobel committee must be backlogged to Hell and back.
I see this sort of application having a lot of use in the kinds of derivative pop music developed by ensembles of songwriters and manufactured purely to generate radio hits. Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer is genius. The average person listening to Taylor Swift just does not care about Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer.
In a way, Magenta's job is not besting Bach. By the definition of Bach (a human being who changes the way we view and enjoy music), a non-human being cannot best Bach. Magenta's job is besting a much simpler, if equally challenging role - Max Martin, or the writers of "Let it Go".
As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic. Much has been written on repetitive chord progressions being spammed across hundreds of famous singles. In a way, artists shouldn't fear the potential of these technologies besting them - they should thank them.
Freed now are artists from loading their albums with eye-rollingly generic lead singles that they immediately get sick of ("Stairway to Heaven", "Creep", "Smells Like Teen Spirit") because record labels know that's what will get the most radio play. You can just let the machine do those. Now, an artists' reputation is determined purely by his relative mettle against other human artists.
In other news, bananas have surpassed OS X in daily Caloric consumption. I knew Apple couldn't make it without Jobs.
People conflate the purposes of various products under the umbrella term "social network", which makes the assumption that all social networks offer arbitrarily similar function. Simply not true.
Snapchat offers ephemeral pictoral content with humorous ad-hoc additive filters. This tailors the product for those that desire ephemeral pictoral content with humorous ad-hoc additive filters. Apparently, a bunch of young kids.
Twitter offers what is now known through the shorthand, "microblogging". This tailors the product for people who like "microblogging". Apparently, a bunch of people, the median age being higher than Snapchat's median age.
Just because more people are spending time on Snapchat than on Twitter, does not mean that Snapchat is "taking away" from Twitter time. Perhaps different people are signing up for Snapchat that are not signed up for Twitter. Perhaps people that are spending X hours on Twitter are now spending Y hours on Snapchat without taking away from the X hours spent on Twitter. Elapsed eyeball time, and, ergo, ad revenue, are still the same. This isn't a zero-sum game. Twitter shouldn't break a sweat because Snapchat is getting more popular. Facebook shouldn't break a sweat because Twitter's no-character limit policy may increase user base.
Perhaps the zero-sum approach to competition makes sense in certain fields, like when products are similar substitutes of each other; like two different kinds of general-purpose glue offered on the market. Or when market capitalization of a certain kind of product is fixed : it's been widely assumed that the average American's entertainment budget is relatively fixed, so in a philosophical sense, if one popular band didn't exist, another popular band would be more popular.
But when it comes to products like "social networks"? With vast design philosophies and product focus and varying demographics? It's very reductionist to publish a headlines like this and assume it makes any sort of meaningful conclusions. As with any sufficiently popular business, this stuff is capital-C complicated and you can't explain relative differences in success using singular metrics like this.
I have thought of a fundamental fallacy in my argument.
If the Universe is a computer, then it should be able to be entirely simulated within a program. Ergo, this simulation must be able to reach a point in time in which the human inside the simulation will be able to code a simulation. So the second simulation must be able to reach a point in time in which the human inside the second simulation will be able to code a third simulation....
This directly conflicts with the heat death of the Universe.
However, you can formulate a new belief. You can say that the probability of life spawning during the heat death is not 0; but rather, it approaches 0. As in, it is 1 - .9 repeating. If you can imagine, it is the largest irrational number greater than 0. So there is an infinitely small but still non-zero chance that life will occur at the heat death of the Universe. Eventually, Bayesian probability will ensure that this life will occur. The Big Bang will repeat. This is a cyclical view of the Universe : Big Bang -> Heat Death -> Big Bang. Again, I do not have any evidence for this point. It is a purely irrational view.
Atomism is a religion, not a philosophy. In terms of religions, it only really fundamentally breaks the second law of thermodynamics. That isn't that bad.
I think all atheists are atomists. If you do not believe in the afterlife, then you do not believe that your life has any meaning. Ergo, kill yourself/live as hedonistically as humanly possible. The very fact that you do not kill yourself/just fuck and drink all day signals that you think your impact on the planet is not finite. But this conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics, which insures all thought, life, and computation are finite. Ergo, your belief system breaks the second law of thermodynamics, so you must be an atomist.
I've spent some time with Stallman in real life. There is very little variance between Ubuntu and OS X to him. They both have free kernels (Linux, XNU) that come with nonfree binary blobs (device drivers) and nonfree userlands (Ubuntu apt-get main channel is not entirely free, OS X is obviously nonfree). To Stallman, once you give convenience the time of day, you might as well be Bill Gates.
In a philosophical sense, it is not helpful to perceive the difference between "ideas" and "execution" as a binary reduction on two sets. Instead, I view it as the idea-execution gradient.
The theoretical limit on an idea-first mindset is 'literally only your idea matters. It doesn't matter how you execute it.' The theoretical limit on an execution-first mindset is 'literally only your execution matters. It doesn't matter what the idea is'. We can represent your stance on this gradient with a rational number coefficient, M. What you believe Matters.
If you have a low M, you are idea-first. If you have a high M, you are execution-first.
Let's assume the existence of a hypothetically Platonic M. By definition, founders of the most successful startups have a Platonic M.
My point was, I believed the Platonic M is currently far lower than what the Valley rhetoric advocates for.
Yeah, I definitely agree that iOS is a walled garden. It sucks and I hope Android continues growing in the high-end smartphone field so it can demolish the restrictive ecosystem that is iOS.
The Play Store is relatively free. If anything, at least you can access the Android filesystem so if you so wished, you could install an .apk outside of Google's ecosystem. Jesus.
And that's just mobile. In the desktop and web environment, platforms are super-open. You can pretty much distribute any .exe or .app you'd like on your website and it's the user's fault if he ends up downloading a virus. Furthermore, you can write your webserver code in literally anything you want. There are CGI scripts for C if you were really that insane. I'm pretty sure someone out there has figured out how to turn a physical Turing tape machine into something that generates HTML and CSS templates.
Your templates end up having to have some JavaScript in them, I guess, but even then. JS is still open-source, and it's ended up being more of a target language than it is a programming language these days.
Developers need to make a living. In Microsoft's heyday, Microsoft could abuse their monopoly to coerce developers to care more about making a living than they cared about what they liked (OSS).
Now, this simply isn't true anymore.
My insults lobbed at Bill Gates were merely jokes. I obviously have a ton of respect for the man. Monopolies aside, he was the leading entrepreneur of his day alongside Jobs.
Minor question; is it just me or is the "Results of Interview Simulations by Mean Score" a bit difficult to parse? I understand that observing the behavior of any singular cohort involves looking at the endpoints of the cohort's curve at the horizontal line 'x=n', where n is number of simulations you wish to observe (the right point of the curve at x=n is P(fail) of the worst performer in the cohort at n simulations, the left point of the curve at x=n is the P(fail) of the best performer); which is why the gap between endpoints within a singular cohort decreases as n increases. But it seems kind of counterintuitive to observe any other kind of trend -- shouldn't the information be graphed as P(fail) being a function of # of simulations, as opposed to the other way around, seeing as the latter is the independent variable?
>[something semantic and pedantic about maritime vessels vs taking other's property]
Piracy, or copyright infringement, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, and theft have the same practical effect : you're accessing a consumable good without paying the requisite cost, your individual crime may not have a large effect on the ability of the seller to provide for that good, but, on the large scale, if everyone committed your crime, you would severely affect the seller's ability to both 1. provide for him/her/their-self and 2. provide that good to the people. So, for all intents and purposes, yes, piracy is theft in cause & effect, if not in literal, philosophical definition.
I said it in my first post. If paid channels are byzantine and draconian, don't pay. You still don't have a right to the content. Just don't buy it. That's "fight" enough. That's "protest" enough.
>[some extremely condescending and pretentious teenage bullshit about "not giving up the fight"]
No, buddy, you're not on some morally righteous journey to freedom. Ironically enough, the DRM, DMCA, and the Gestapo-ification of the MPAA and RIAA only exist because of people like you. The executives and middlemen (i.e.: cable networks, record labels, publishers) hate piracy because it severely harms their bottom line, the artists hate piracy because it harms their livelihood, the consumers hate piracy because it leads to annoying DRM and other counterpiracy measures that end up harming paying consumers most. The only people that are lifting their fists in the air with you are, bingo, other pirates.
People often use this very semantic, very pedantic difference and expand it to make it a difference in practical effect. Piracy and theft have the same practical effect : you're accessing a consumable good without paying the requisite cost, your individual crime may not have a large effect on the ability of the seller to provide for that good, but, on the large scale, if everyone committed your crime, you would severely affect the seller's ability to both 1. provide for him/her/their-self and 2. provide that good to the people. So, for all intents and purposes, yes, piracy is theft.
I know, it just ticks me off when people act like they're on some fucking morally righteous journey of freedom against the evil companies, and not just finding a sleazy way to get free movies like every other broke college kid.
I'm not saying piracy has had no part in a positive change in society. I know that, without Napster, stuff like iTunes and Spotify couldn't exist. I know that Spotify itself started out with a repository of pirated music. I know that many cable companies and radio stations just started off by illegally rebroadcasting other networks' content.
The recurring pattern is that these people committing acts of piracy had a larger goal/conclusion in mind. They often ended up legally servicing and selling media and entertainment on a far larger scale than they ever illegally stole it. These people didn't have the resources and content to go about their business otherwise, and saw fit to commit acts of theft in the short-term to convince people that the core of their structure was worth getting access to content legally. The vast majority of pirates don't have such ambitions. They just want free movies.
> if a movie company won't let me pay them to let me watch a movie/TV show via Steam, Netflix, or even from their own site, then I'll just watch it on Popcorn Time and it's their loss.
Right, except you don't have the right to do that. You have no carte blanche entitlement to access media or entertainment. If the executives at HBO figure that, financially speaking, it's in their best interest to keep new Game of Thrones episodes accessible to cable customers only, you have the right to not buy it and be frustrated at that and protest it until eventually enough people protest for HBO to budge.
What you don't have the right to do is then to circumvent the legal and technological system set up for you to purchase Game of Thrones and access it for free, which, yes, is fucking theft. I can hear the scoffing through TCP/IP.
And you're not just harming the company, you're not just harming the already rich suits at HBO. This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. People figure getting their music for free is a more rational individual choice than paying $16 for a CD. Everyone then makes the decision to get their media for free. Who cares about those stupid record labels, anyways?
Suddenly, smaller markets around the world have their industry gutted by piracy, smaller labels have to shut down, bigger labels have to fire hundreds of less successful artists that they used to be able to support from the money they made on the more successful artists, the more successful artists have to stop relying on royalties from album sales and have to whore themselves out doing nonstop touring year-round for money. Thank God it's physically impossible to "pirate" concert tickets.
I know we're going on a tangent here, but people often falsely conflate open-source access to information and piracy into this one big, happy revolution against the evil gatekeepers and their evil transactions that involve my money. No. Piracy is just fucking theft, period.