bryondowd

I think the point was that secular wars are generally for resources. Nuclear war practically eliminates the possibility of gaining resources, because you're likely to lose more than you gain as your cities get vaporized. So the drive to start one is significantly lessened. Religious wars on the other hand, all bets are off. You're doing it for salvation, so even if the victor ends up poorer for it materially, it's still worthwhile to start.

Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind:

1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term.

2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.

There's no shortage of applicants. They get tons of applicants every year, but the FAA academy can only accept a limited number to their 3-4 month training program. Then they wash out roughly 50% of the trainees with their final exam, which is a set of ATC scenarios on a simulator. Existing controllers have to take the same exam to become a trainer at the academy, and roughly 1/3 of them also fail, so one could argue that the standards are set far too high. The survivors go on to their first posting, where they spend another year or two training before they can actually control live traffic on their own, and more wash out in this stage if they fail to certify.

Worth noting that this mass firing is coming around for a second wave of hurt. They re-staffed most of the ATC force with military personnel who were around the same age, all at the same time. Now that block of people are hitting the ATC's mandatory retirement age (56) and last I checked they haven't had much success (arguably intentionally, but that's another story) in increasing their onboarding stream enough to compensate for the sudden loss. Current controllers are already working large (possibly unsafe) amounts of overtime and have limited ability to change locations or positions due to the shortage, which is only getting worse.

At some point, they'll either need to find a way to accept more trainees, retain employees longer, or reduce services/throughput.

EDIT: I may be out of date. Perhaps this second wave already came and went with little impact. My math says anyone hired in 1981 would be past retirement age by now. Not sure how they handled it.

Arguably, building trust and social relationships with coworkers can create opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have. Networking is the common word for it. The more people out there in the world, and especially within your industry, who are thinking of you, the more often you'll get a message from someone you trust about some new job opportunity they just came across and thought might be a good fit for you. Those tend to be better opportunities than the ones that get publicly broadcasted, and they don't tend to get offered to people who seem standoffish.

And I'm speaking as a standoffish person who seldom to never gets those offers, but my wife often skips the need to job hunt because perfect jobs just fall into her lap from all the connections she's made.

I'd argue that the digitized versions would likely last several years. After a catastrophe stuck, one of the instructions after securing immediate survival would be to transcribe the contents to whatever media is available for longevity. Likely entire libraries of books. Otherwise you'd need to store and maintain those entire libraries everywhere prior to the event, which would be harder to accomplish and keep safe.

Can't think on a real word example, but abc would match bcd in the above algo, as both permute to bc, but they are distance 2. So, any case where one letter is deleted and another is added at a different position.

I've never heard of a termination based on individual performance being called a layoff. In fact, I'm fairly certain it's defined as a termination due to factors outside the employee's control. A layoff is when the position itself no longer exists due to downsizing, restructuring, etc.

Being terminated due to poor performance or a bad fit is not a layoff, by any standard I've heard of, and some brief googling seems to support that. Terminating an employee for being a bad fit and calling it a layoff would almost certainly invite legal action.

But I'm no lawyer, so if you've got a source backing up the claim, I'd love to see it and be enlightened.

This just isn't true, at least in New Jersey. For NJ Unemployment, being fired only renders you ineligible if you are fired for misconduct, which is further defined as requiring intent or sufficient negligence to imply a disregard for the job. Meanwhile, employers aren't limited to firing you for misconduct or layoffs. You can be fired because you're just not a good fit for the team/position. In that case, you are eligible for unemployment because you didn't quit but didn't commit misconduct. If you asked to resign instead of being fired, you'd be giving up your right to collect NJUI.

I can't speak for other states, but I'd be surprised if NJ is entirely unique.

Depends where you are. Pretty sure I've made under $25/hr most of my development career. And that was just fine, in the Atlantic City, NJ area, because the cost of living was pretty low and I had no interest in moving or commuting to a big city.

EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.

Your link shows it bottoming out in 2009-2011 after the housing crash, well below the 1992 ratio. And then a steady and mostly linear climb from late 2011 to the end of the data.

After that early 90s recession there's a steady rise to the dotcom burst around 2000, which bottoms around 03 and starts to rise again until the housing crash. Seems like a pattern. Progress until the financiers manage to tank the economy, repeat.

Had a very similar experience unintentionally. A coworker was making mixed drinks with Everclear, which was 190 proof (95% alcohol). I badly misjudged how much I was drinking, and it was one of three times in my life I threw up from drinking (probably saved me from alcohol poisoning). Took me a few days to recover fully. Before that incident, my preferred drink was whiskey neat and I could drink it like water. Ever since, any hard spirits make me nauseous immediately if they aren't mixed and diluted heavily. I figure it's my body's defense mechanism telling me not to drink poison anymore.

Can confirm, dealing with code in a foreign language is not easy. A few years ago I had to re-implement from behavior in our application that had been baked into the firmware of our old printers, since the new ones were supposed to be off-the-shelf. We had the source code for the old printers, so no problem, right? Except the company that made them was French, so every comment was in French, and all the identifiers were not just French, but French abbreviations and acronyms mixed together. I could run the comments through Google translate and get a good enough idea, but there was almost nothing I could do about the identifiers, except occasionally get lucky and guess based on cognates. Can't imagine how it would have gone if the language was less similar, like any of the Asian languages.

Thankfully, I didn't really need to refer to the source code often, since I could just work out the finer points of the behaviors I needed to mimic by printing messages that hit all the corner cases.

The bar for Medicaid for a two person household in most states was $22,715. Pretty good chance she was over that.

Where's the problem? I've been leaning towards the idea that maybe every election should have a hand count. You can get your electronic count first for the early announcements, but it should be verified by the hand count. What's the downside, just the cost? Seems likely worthwhile to me.

Your link seems to indicate that the spec hadn't changed, that was just speculation that was disproved on inspecting the wreckage, and it turns out the design was basically bad in the first place, due to very tight safety margins and the poor understanding of engineering a ship at the time.

I've seen a number of people pointing at this likely being more an issue with untrained pilots than the plane itself. EI, the flight crew on the crashed planes may have had considerably less experience than the minimum requirements most major airlines and all US airlines set for flying these planes.

Not that special of a case. There's around 10-11 million VFR flights per year, versus around 15-16 million IFR flights, according to this FAA doc[0]

How many of those VFR flights have/use autopilot during their flight, I can't say, but basic autopilot systems for GA planes have gotten pretty affordable, so I would expect there's at least hundreds of flights any given day where a VFR pilot engages an autopilot during the flight.

The main difference is that none of those VFR flights are big airliners with hundreds of passengers. For those who don't know the difference, an oversimplification would be VFR = pilot is 99% in charge, with very little assistance from air traffic controllers outside of special controlled airspace, IFR = controllers are giving the pilot very detailed instructions for the entire flight. And it's pretty much one or the other.

[0] PDF: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/media/Air_Tra...

Seems like you're conflating Smart AI with an optimal game playing algorithm. An aimbot isn't hard time create, sure, but it's not exactly smart, either. Nor is it fun. I agree it's harder to make mediocre but fun AI, and that's what current shooters do. The point is that there's theoretically a level above that, harder to achieve but not impossible, where the AI behaves like a human would. A reasonable balance of predictability and unpredictability, skill, strategy, but not perfection.

In a real time strategy, it seems we're approaching that level with that StarCraft ai. Need to perhaps restrain the ai's ability to micro by fuzzing it's ability to control quickly and precisely in bursts, and then continue to advance it's strategic ability, but I expect it'll get there eventually.

In the case of shooters. It might involve giving the AI a noisy view of the game world, to force it to approach the problem the way a human does. Humans don't just have an accuracy rate or a timer between an event entering their screen and their ability to shoot at it. A human has to filter through visual noise to notice a target, and decide how to engage. A human has to use an arm and hand and muscle memory to manipulate a mouse to get bullets on target. Those are all imperfect controls, with a certain amount of uncertainty between intent and action. All that is further influenced by how prepared the human was, how much they have to adjust their previous plans, or recenter their attention.

It's a difficult task to identify all the things that actually make a game difficult for a human and make sure the AI faces a close approximation of the same problems. Then it's even more difficult to get an AI to a point where it can compete on a human level, not to mention various human levels.

That doesn't mean it's not possible or not worthwhile.

Interesting talk, but it really pretty much confirmed a lot of my assumptions about Civ AI. He pretty much admits that they are constrained on developer resources and AI code only makes of a small percentage of the game. Because of that, they have to make do with very naive assumptions about strategy. And because of that, they have to cheat to get the AI up to a level that's even considered fun.

At first I thought he seemed to be making a lot of false dichotomies, but really, he was saying, these are my only choices, given the overarching constraint on how much effort we can put into our AI. Basically, all of the AI decisions he talked about were small scale heuristics, with no ability to really look at the bigger picture, which is what the player is always doing when making small decisions.

And of course, personalities are a great idea, and not mutually exclusive with a strong AI. One thing I very much disagreed with was when he said an AI can roleplay, but a player wouldn't do that, the player just plays to win at all costs. But earlier on he even talked about one of the player types is people who play for a narrative. Those are roleplayers. So, especially at lower difficulty levels, it makes a lot of sense for the AI personalities to trump optimal play. But that doesn't mean you can't have a strong AI in general, that makes some limited sacrifices for the sake of fun.

Likewise with diplomacy. It isn't about making the game as difficult as possible. If that were the goal, you could just make the player lose when he loaded the game. It's about making it feel like you're on roughly even footing with your opponents, so that success has meaning. To that end, I would expect each empire to act in its own best interest, and therefore treat the player the same as it would any other opponent. It's also why diplomatic options need game mechanics to enforce them. As he pointed out, if there's no mechanic to stop a player from accepting money for peace, and then declaring war again, then there is no reason to every pay for peace. You should design these mechanics with player behavior in mind, and the AI should use them the same way players do. Think about how players behave with one another, make that fun, and then make the AI behave similarly. This wasn't possible given their constraints, but it's certainly possible in the more general sense.

As far as "making the game too hard isn't any fun" that's the problem. Too hard is subjective. What's too hard for one person is perfect for another, and way too easy for yet another. If anything, to please the maximum number of people, you'd have to write (or train) a very skilled AI that can compete with the brightest players. If you can do that, it should be much easier to tone it down or penalize it to make easier difficulties for the average and casual players.

The only Paradox game I've played is Stellaris, which has god-awful AI. Looks like it uses the Clausewitz engine, so perhaps that's the reason. But the AI empires are terrible at balancing their economies, and it doesn't take long for the player to completely outstrip them, even when giving the AIs advanced starts and bonuses. And then the military AI isn't very good, to the point that when it is outmatched by a stronger opponent, it basically sits and waits to be slaughtered.

The only remote challenge comes in the form of the endgame 'crisis' which is basically an empire that appears late in the game with huge armies and has no economy, just scripted reinforcements and possibly some scripted counters from other special AI entities. None of the regular AI empires will have advanced enough to even think about fighting it, so it mostly serves as a check to see if the player has played efficiently enough to that point to stop the threat, and marks a good point to end your game once you have.

The scripted events make for a somewhat interesting game, but if they could provide an AI that actually made the universe feel like a competition in the early and mid game, and like the other empires were a factor in the end game, it would bring the game to another whole level for me. Of course, they'd probably have to fix their general game balance as well, which an a whole other issue.

If your game doesn't give competitors perfect knowledge of the game state, it would make sense for the AI to track previous activity of its current opponent as part of the 'play state' for making decisions. For instance, if it doesn't know where the enemy is, but the enemy has attacked from this direction every time so far, it would prepare for another attack from that direction. Or if the last time the AI made a given offensive move, the player countered effectively a certain way, it may modify its next offensive to overcome that counter. The longer the game, the more it could appear to be learning to counter its opponent, even though, as you say, it's just making the optimal move given the current state of play.

The "tank huge amounts of damage" thing has annoyed me going back to the old RPG games on NES and SNES. How do we make the game harder as the player progresses? Give enemies more HP and DMG values. Ok, how does the player combat this? Have him aquire levels/skills/equipment that increases his own DMG and survivability to restore things to the same balance they were earlier in the game. Repeat ad nauseum. Some variations restrict the player enhancements to DMG so they're forced to chip away at enemies in long dull fights. Others restrict survivability, which tends to result in shorter, more random fights, while others allow near infinite enhancement, but lock it behind boring, redundant grinding.

Yeah, that sounds less like a 'smart' AI gone wrong and more like a typical cheating AI. In this case, instead of an actual cheat it's just able to act at superhuman speeds. Similar to the speculated issue with the Starcraft AI. Even though that one was constrained in actions per minute, it wasn't really constrained the same way a human is.

In general, the smarter you make the AI, the more you have to work to give it constraints to keep it from cheesing the player the same way players often cheese dumb AIs.

In the case of an RTS, you can force the AI to manipulate a cursor and view area the same way a human does. Only give it partial information about areas outside the current view. Put limits on cursor manipulation. Maybe add a fudge factor that makes its clicks land randomly within X distance of its target, where X is based on the average speed the cursor has moved in the last half a second. That alone would make it harder for it to give orders to a bunch of individual units fast enough to out-micro a player, and you're really just giving it constraints similar to a human operating a mouse.

What talk is that? Last time I tried a Civ game, I was underwhelmed. That AI just isn't fun to play against, to me. And the games run too long to play against humans in a reasonable timeframe on normal settings. I'd love to play Civ with competitive AIs.

Considering how many successful games are released targeting a niche market, there's probably a pretty sizable niche market of 'better than average players' that some studio could take advantage of.

Market size is only half the equation, the other half is the cost to develop the feature. As methods and technology improve, the cost to make a smart AI for a complex game system should decrease. As the cost decreases, you need less of the overall gaming market to make a return. Might just be a matter of time before somebody takes a gamble on a tough AI, has a huge success, and then everyone starts to emulate it.

Depends on the game. The entire genre of strategy games could probably benefit from smarter AI. More so for 4X style games. Mostly, the current AIs act like players, but make terribly inefficient decisions that get 'balanced' at various difficulty levels by throwing more resources at them or other advantages. So the games vary between being absurdly easy, to being difficult simply because the AI cheats, and even then, it doesn't usually leverage its advantage well. As an alternative, people play against other players, but with long-running strategy games, this adds real life logistical problems. An AI that plays like a human, and can be adjusted for stronger or weaker play would be amazing for the 4X genre. Perhaps difficulty adjustments could even be reverse to giving the player 'cheats' or free resources on lower difficulties if that's easier than throttling the AI.

Outside of those games, I'd say any game with competitive multiplayer could benefit from smart human-like AI. Some people play games for a challenge. The unpredictability of other humans is most of the fun, whereas playing against a typical game AI is just a matter of figuring out how it works, where it fails, and then taking advantage of that failure repeatedly. Considering the market for competitive online games, there's likely a similar market for competitive AI games.

I suspect the real barrier that is that it's a lot cheaper and easier to sick players on one another than to make a challenging human-like AI.

I believe the solution is probably more along the lines of taxing everyone fairly, and using some of the funds to provide free or affordable childcare to everyone who wants/needs it. Likewise with other forms of family support/advantages. Provide alternatives for people who don't have things by birth-lottery.

So you can still have grandma watch your kid all you like, while the person who has no living relatives can still have a kid and hold a job by taking advantage of subsidized daycare.

In my experience, the robocallers are more likely to leave voicemail. You just get the first 10 seconds of their recording chopped off and the rest in your mailbox. So now you've just moved your issue from live calls to having to check your mailbox periodically to see if there's anything important mixed with the spam. Plus the added possibility that a legit caller doesn't leave a message, and something important gets delayed due to an inability to contact you.

This caught my attention so I looked for a source. Looks like this rate is the number of people who are Employed (60.7%) or have been actively seeking work in the last week (4%) out of the total population of people who are 16 years or older, not institutionalized, and not active military.

The source I found doesn't break down the remaining 35.3% of the population much, except to pull out about 2% as marginally attached or discouraged. Basically, people who have given up looking for work. I tried figuring out the makeup of the remaining 33%, but without much luck. How many 16 and older students are out there not working because they are full time committed to schooling? Hard to figure out, because so many students have part time jobs or are at least actively looking for part time jobs. Then, how many people are retired by choice, versus retired because there's no more work for them? How many homemakers are staying home with kids because they can't earn enough to significantly exceed childcare expenses versus those who stay home because they don't need or want to work?