PredictorY

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are not the "same thing". To say so does not "oversimplify things just a little bit": It is grossly inaccurate. Expert systems, pattern recognition, robotics and fuzzy logic- all part of A.I.- do not, per se, involve learning (though they may).

This planet has reached 'peak intelligence', and is not on the downward slope.

So, this is just an advertisement?

By far the most common is supervised learning (in which there is a target variable). Less common is unsupervised learning (in which there is no target variable, but solution quality still might be measurable). Occasionally, one comes across reinforcement learning (long-term performance is measurable, but little or no short-term feedback is available), and a variety of more special-purpose techniques like association rule discovery / link analysis, anomaly detection, sequential patterns mining, frequent pattern mining and probably several others I've forgotten.

I have to wonder what the legal ramifications of using one of these things to defend oneself would be.

Excel's pseudorandom number generator is weak: Agreed. The claim that someone, presumably a well-situated person in the Canadian government, might be able to put their finger on the scale for this applicant versus the others seems reasonable. Otherwise, the notion that a bad PRNG, even the one in Excel, will "favor" one group over another, or one person over others, seems a stretch.

Sorry, you're right: TO me, either there's a fit or there isn't. I guess my point was that no perks will compensate for a bad fit.

Personally, I'm much more concerned with the day-to-day work situation than perks, but remote work (near 100%, preferably) is something I look for.

I think that's an interesting question: It seems that many people assume that taxation and regulation should be the norm.

One argument often made by governments in favor of the taxes they collect is the services they provide, especially, in the case of sales taxes, the legal protections they offer buyers. I wonder how well that justification holds up in the world of on-line retail?

It's worth noting that the actual title of that essay is, "Why do deep convolutional networks generalize so poorly to small image transformations?"

In viewing the page titled 'The Criminal is Disproportionately Likely to be a Foreigner', I am reminded of the "New Yorker's View of the World": http://i.imgur.com/A3JwoFr.jpg

The interesting thing about this paper is that the "intelligent" component does not select the binarization threshold directly, but is contained within a loop (see figure 1) which iteratively adjusts the threshold.

I feel that this discussion has wandered. Are you arguing that the Chinese government is concerned with false positives in their social scoring system?

This information is easy to find on-line, by searching for "cost of living". See, for instance: https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator

I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't this fall under "fair use"?

Come on... Using Python doesn't mean you can't have a sense of humor, too!

Of course FORTRAN still matters. Somebody has to write real neural network code. We can't all be Python script kiddies!

If you don't back it up, you dopn't want it.

Since you brought this up: Do you agree that Europeans don't have free speech?

Some general suggestions:

- At least occasionally read something that isn't on a screen (in a book).

- Do some experimentation on your own. Too many pretenders in this field parrot whatever they heard elsewhere. It's hard to argue with actual results.

- Don't mindlessly chase whatever's trendy: that's an endless treadmill and "the crowd" wastes a lot of time.

- Once you understand a few machine learning algorithms, you probably have enough. A bigger toolbox is better, but I recommend paying attention to things other than the machine learning activity itself, such as application of machine learning to the problem, data collection, data preparation and model validation.

I disagree. I argue that the Chinese government and the one I live under (in the United States) could hardly be more different. The government of China was established for the benefit of the rulers (the Party). The American Founding Fathers said "Government is like fire: It makes a good servant, but a poor master." Our Constitution was written primarily to constrain the government.

Only two countries have gotten to 1 billion inhabitants, and I'd say that the government of India is much less callous or calculating than that of China.

"Mortals never sell me their souls. They give them away." -Satan, "The Broken Sword" by Poul Anderson

Some governments are more callous than others.

"...a mechanism to dispute entries"

I seriously doubt that the Chinese government is interested in inviting dispute. Dispute is exactly what such a surveillance system is designed to suppress.

A callous government which oversees the lives of 1,000 million citizens isn't concerned with thousands of false positives.

I don't think this is new. "TRON" (1982) and "Robocop" (1987), for instance, featured "evil CEOs".

When strong commercial encryption becomes illegal, two things will happen: 1. Criminals and terrorists will construct their own strong encryption (anyone can buy books explaining how to do this from Amazon, and any competent programmer can do it) and 2. China, Russia and organized crime will penetrate the weakened commercial encryption.

Do these costs come from the Snowden leak, the various behaviors it exposed, or some combination of both?

For ages, the world has dangerously low-balled the economic (and human) cost of war, political apathy, hyper-allegiance to nation and God: Why should this be any different?

Unless I am married to Dr. Seung or Dr. Lee, I'm not sure why this should matter to me?