270 karma · joined September 8, 2012
Aren't all proofs flawed in this way?
Like for example, 2 = fish. Prove that there isn't an undiscovered mathematical axiom that makes this not nonsense?
In the sense that it takes a huge amount of time and images to train the thing to become smart (in other words, to go through the entire network of neurons one by one and assign better weight values etc) but when it comes to actually verifying if our network is smart all it takes is to run an image straight through the network?
And the issue of trying to prove N=NP is essentially trying to prove that there isn't a magical way to train a neural network with just one image of training data?
You know, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder about how much quantum computation is going to change the game.
Where we aren't just calculating ups and downs but superpositions between the two.
I think the way I feel about this story depends completely on whether or not they knew they were going to be able to deliver on their promise soon.
One thing that this article gets wrong is the fact that they say it's not a software company. Do they think these machines are built mechanically or something? Of course it is a software company.
The kind of AI that would be required to analyze a couple of drops of blood and be able to tell what is wrong with people would have to be extremely sophisticated.
Not only that but they would probably need to start gathering a lot of blood from people to be able to build up the AI's intelligence when it comes to discerning the properties of healthy blood samples when compared to diseased blood.
These are the kind of questions that are worth asking. But instead we just have the media who wants to get the jump on a juicy story.
What Elizabeth Holmes did was fraud in that she was dishonest. But how dishonest and was that dishonesty necessary?
Like I said there is a lot more here than meets the eye. Otherwise she wouldn't be trying to get share holders to take more shares to not sue.
From what I gather, she either expects to get acquired (which means the technology and patents are very valuable but for whatever reason there is something getting in the way) or she expects that she will actually be able to deliver on her promises.
I personally think that she is an unsettling and creepy woman, but I do think that having a machine that you can go into a walgreens, get your finger pricked and run a quick blood lab, with "better than most doctor" diagnostics printing/sending out results right there in front of you, has crazy life saving possibilities.
I really don't think Silicon Valley was duped. I am thinking that they saw the crazy potential something like this could bring to the world if it actually existed.
So like I said before, I really want to know what is wrong with the prototype and can it be fixed?
Also the notion in the article that these things tend to be developed in open forums is nonsense. Big Pharm doesn't spill the beans on drugs they are developing until they have to when filing for Patents/FDA Approval. And Doctors don't spill the beans on procedures/tools they are developing until they have to when filing for patents/FDA approval.
You have to be very skeptical when dealing with these kind of disruptive "job killing" innovations. Who needs to go to their local doctor when medicine is become more and more electronically driven?
Some day people will be able to go to a CVS or Walgreens and step into a photo booth like machine, get a finger prick, EKG, MRI, blood pressure taken, answer a quick survey and have their prescriptions printed out in less than 15 minutes.
And it will actually work better at making people healthy than doctors do today.
All these doctors who spent $320k going to an ivy league med school and have 3 million dollar 30 year mortgages don't like the idea of being replaced by HAL. So why should we believe they wouldn't try to curtail any innovation that makes them more and more redundant?
Nobody likes having to have a person stick a finger up your ass to tell you whether your baby maker is still good to go.
I mean sometimes that is what I only see and i am like happy with the fact that I am forced to see ads. And then other times I am starting to see things that I really don't care about simply because I had a whim to go down some rabbit hole on Google.
I think some developers use ads very responsibly and I think that overall denying those developers the right to generate money off your usage prevents them from growing their business and creating better products. I tend to think of flappy bird when I think of great ad placement. The ads don't get in the way of the game. They don't pop up while you are in mid game to try and trick you into clicking. They only appear after you died and they aren't full screen and annoying with a tiny little x you might miss.
I mean that is the kind of ads that I can live with and I think everybody else should have to live with too. Hell I even might give them a click every now and then despite the fact that I am not interested in buying the advertised product.
I just think of it like throwing some change in the hat of a busking street artist. It's the least I could do to encourage them to continue pursuing their art.
And then I just started realizing how creepy it is that they don't even allow somebody to outright delete their profile unless they have died and their legacy admin proves they have died and deletes it for them.
How creepy is that? They are like a manipulative partner in a relationship, who thinks they have their hooks in you so deep that they act all compassionately when you say you want to break up, but deep inside they are saying to themselves, "You'll be back bitch. You know you need daddy."
It used to be a good thing. I mean i've sparked a few relationships using facebook. But nowadays it's just political banter, pictures of single mother's babies (i lost my baby son 5 years ago so this makes me uncomfortable when im bombarded by everybody else's little bundles of joy), memes memes memes memes, stories about dead/missing people, non stop selfies, and nothing of real substance.
Aren't we supposed to like not know so much about other people so that when we get together we have something to discover about each other? It's like we have gotten to the point where we NEED to know everything about people we actually don't really know that well in real life.
And everybody is competing for points on who can be the most self obsessed and nosey at the same time. I'd rather watch Youtube videos because at least that is art in a way. People taking time to make sure what they say is presented in the best format possible.
I think people need to be concerned that Governments, at any point of time, with their incomprehensibly huge computation power, can use it to crush bitcoin. Not only that but they can pass laws that allow them to forcibly seize the fattest wallets. Which ultimately ensure's that the Government can, behind the scenes, kick the scaffolding out from beneath us. All I see right now is state level actors experimenting in this regard, because seriously who single handedly has the computation power to take control of these cryptocurrency's if its not the government or a company like Google?
I just found that Government are just a bunch of prom kings and queens telling the kids who created lemonade stands that not only did they owe them a cut of their profits, but how and where they could sell their lemonade. And there is a shitload of corruption involved because they will tell you to move your lemonade stand so that they can give the location to a friend.
I believe we need a Government, but I don't believe we need an omnipotent Government that has the power to employ half of the nation despite not having a notion of equity or a competitive pay scale.
So slowly over time I found that I am actually Libertarian and I vote for Republicans because at the end of the day, the only real way the Government can make people's lives better is to get out of the way (and pockets) of the private sector. Which is the real backbone of this country. The private sector is the only sector that has the real power to improve the quality of life and self esteem of Americans, because as FDR put it in his extended bill of rights, every American has the right to a good job.
I think we should have a constitutional amendment that makes it unconstitutional for Congress to raise taxes above 15% for all Americans, and I think the tax payers should have a say in how 5% of their Tax Dollars get allocated into the budget. The President and Congress gets to say where the other 10% goes.
I think if we had a system like that, then everybody would get a little bit of what they want. You care about the state of our national parks? Then say that is where you want a percentage of your 5% to be allocated for this voting cycle. You think our military sucks? Send your bucks there. You think we need to fund the FCC because they got rid of net neutrality. Then go for it. And if you don't really care and think the President or Congress knows best, then allocate your 5% to be distributed according to their best judgement.
Send your tax dollars where you feel they need to go. It's the best way to get a comprehensive understanding of what exactly the people's concerns are.
Perhaps it would be chaotic, but what is to say that democracy shouldn't have an element of volatile chaos in it?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/... (also as I explain latter, i think the "half truth" rating on this link is half truth. Nobody who downloaded the Obama app, knew that their friend list could be used in a way to identify potential voters, especially not in a way that would have raised ethical concerns in the supposed party that "cares" about fair elections)
But of course the left needs to punish Facebook for not properly covering their asses and assuring this weapon could never be used against them.
By the way, what's to say that Hillary Clinton didn't have direct access to the Obama campaign's data as well? I mean considering the fact people's political affiliations very rarely ever change and therefore data mined in 2012 is just as relevant today as it was then, why wouldn't Hillary Clinton and Obama do everything in their power to ensure the left maintains control of the WH; when they essentially wrote the textbook on this kind of thing? (it's also worth pointing out that the cambridge analytica data was mined at the same period in time.)
The very fact that the policy was changed--right after--the election seems to suggest that Facebook had every intention of giving the left all the data they would ever need to get the competitive edge over the right and win future elections.
Put it this way, Facebook HAD to know how it's data was being mined from the Obama app the second it started happening. Why wouldn't they be paying special attention to the behavior of the President's app and it's users?
They also HAD to know the amount of power that data could have when influencing people since that is the very reason why their business is marketable.
And lastly, they HAD to know that putting a plug in it would stop future campaigns from doing the same and the consequences that might ultimately yield on the outcomes of future elections.
I mean we are talking about a company where some of their founders, Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya, talk about how they would have meetings and discuss how they could manipulate their users into becoming addicted to their app. And that is when and where they coined the phrase "dopamine feedback loops".
Which also means we are talking about a company whose primary goal is to design technology that doesn't just try to understand people psychologically, but trying to understand how they can manipulate people psychologically as well.
And we are supposed to just believe Mark Zuckerburg when he says if you asked him 10 years ago if he thought he would be building an app that could one day influence elections, he isn't just full of shit? I wish the senate would have asked him if he knew--6 years--ago that facebook could influence elections...
Also I wish the Senate would have asked him how can he confirm the Obama 2012 Campaign erased their data like they were supposed to, if he couldn't even confirm that Cambridge Analytica did. And then I would want to ask him, in theory is it possible that if the Obama campaign still had access to that data, could it be given to a new campaign. In other words, is it not only possible but strategically likely, that Trump didn't actually even have a competitive edge? and in fact without the Cambridge Analytica data, he would have been at a strict disadvantage considering your policy changed and therefore wasn't able to just take a page out of Obama's book, create his own app, and ultimately receive the same benefits Obama (and potentially HRC) did during their campaigns?
And one last thing, when a user downloads an app on your platform they have a permissions dialog that specifically states what information a user consents to give to the app developer in exchange for using their app. The controversy with Cambridge Analytica's app was that it was misleading users and exposing their friend list's without permission? Can you please explain exactly how Obama's app asked for user's permissions and how Cambridge Analytica didn't? And when asking, did the Obama campaign explain exactly how they intended to use their user's data? When a user consents to give any app (not just facebook) permission to access their info do the user's have the capability to ask why the app is requesting that information exactly?
Can we get comprehensive answers to questions such as,
"Why--exactly--does this app--need--to access my contacts?",
"Why--exactly--does this app--need--to access my friend list?",
"Why--exactly--does this app--need--access to my mic?"
Also is there an internal vetting process in place that ensures app developers are being honest when stating the nature of their intent with regards to permission requests and what they intend to do with the data once it is received? And ultimately why not? Do you believe users deserve--real--transparency with regards to how their data is being used/abused?
Because ultimately at the end of the day, that is how you go about fixing the core issue we have. User's aren't actually being asked cordially for their permission, they are being given just a more "in your face" terms of service without an explanation and the right to negotiate. What if I want to use facebook's app, but i don't want them to be able to access to my mic as they see fit and im okay with the fact that I can't use the 2 features that require it because I only ever use the 500 that never need to use my mic anyways?
What I am ultimately trying to point out here, is that the permissions not actually being permissions issue isn't just facebook's problem. It's an industry wide issue, and the current permission system only seems to exist in the first place to exempt company's from all the legal problems they smell brewing down the road. Something they'd only ever anticipate and institute knowing all along the malicious nature that is underlying their intent. (I mean steve jobs was the pioneer of this shit. Does anybody really think he cares more about us than Apple's profitability.)
I just think it's so sad that we live in a world now where all mainstream apps are essentially malware and its terrifying to realize that nobody really understands that bad software isn't just the kind of software that opens nonstop porn ads on your desktop and thus make your computer run slow.
http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-d...
The brand book is astonishingly horrible and is not an improvement on the way we are digesting the information.
That is an assignment. There is also a math symbol that specifically designates equivalence.
What's really sad is that nobody has been addressing just how creepy the internet is getting. Like the fact that with just 500 likes the social network can insinuate more of your personality than your lover. Or how Google can predict what you will likely like to eat for breakfast tomorrow based on the kind of stuff you are buying at the store whenever you use reward cards that is gets cross referenced to your browsing habits that insinuate moods.
We are really over engineering the internet to the point that we have a "don't touch that red button" being installed into our lives where nobody knows what it does until it gets pressed, we end up wrecking our cars and are left wondering why the car manufacturers thought it was smart to install NOS in our cars without our knowledge in order to remain on the cutting edge (and thus competitive).
The only thing that I think was the cars fault was that the car is programmed to drive when the driver is driving around distracted. There is no point to a human driver sitting behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle if they aren't paying attention.
People need to understand that self driving mode isn't a freedom from the responsibility of driving safely. Rather its a tool to help ensure that driving statistically becomes safer as more self driving vehicles find their ways onto the road.
Hopefully someday all cars will be self driving and dangerous hazards/traffic reduced to the point that they are virtually none existent rather than being towards the top of the list of "preventable death" and "things humans don't want to waste most of their time during the day doing".
:) :( :| :O :D :/ ;)