neonbat

Yeah it would be nice if they actually said what the software does on the github or in the headline. At first I thought it was a browser or something. Here's the one liner though: "Lantern is an Internet proxy tool that lets you access blocked sites."

Some choice quotes:

"maybe rainbows and unicorns rained down the from space saucers and drowned the dinosaurs; we just don't know."

"humans are not horses [citation needed]"

"We'll all be replaced with undead slave labor."

Unless your costs are greater than 2 billion? I mean then you could make 2 billion in revenue and not turn a profit. ( 2 billion - (# greater than 2 billion) ) = (negative #). This is a very basic concept.

Thanks Obama (no sarcasm).

Well I guess I now know who bought the file.io domain name...

You know what would make the examples really legit? Instead of generic names the community could use names of famous people.

"Dear Humans, for the last several centuries you have used many different mental strategies to try and make decisions. These seem to have produced a generally optimal outcome (ignoring the genocides) with globally increasing standards of living and increases in freedom for humans generally. We are here today to proclaim that you have been wrong all these years. You could have been so much better off if you had only migrated towards where there were more burritos. Ignoring the blatantly counterfactual spin this argument carries, the data is in. Burritos are king. Sincerely, BBD Evangelists"

Burrito based decision making is clearly the way to go.

These kind of seem like general rules for leaving any job.

This kind of thinking is seriously dangerous. This is why burden of proof rests on the state. What something "appears to look like" is irrelevant to the actual crime. That's like saying running from the cops proves your guilt. It doesn't prove anything. Innocent people run all the fucking time because they know the cops will try to violate their rights. Cops are scary. Some people have standard practice to wipe everything. I mean it was his last day at work right? If it was your last day at work, maybe you're just doing general log clearing, like if you were never going to use a browser again one idea might be to wipe the history on that browser, clean out the work station so to speak. Doesn't sound so menacing now does it? Now maybe Goldman has policies against this; it's just an example of how these kinds of non-evidence tangential facts can be used to obscure the reality of a case. Also It would surprise me greatly if this guy was the first guy to wipe his workstation before leaving his job at Goldman.

People here are commenting that he stole code. That that's why Goldman is prosecuting but what constitutes stealing code? I mean the definition is "loosey-goosey-bullshit" at best. I used to work building trading algorithms; there is no clear legal consensus on what constitutes "stealing" code. If I just remember all the code because I have some kind of special photographic memory is that stealing? If I created the code, it's in my mind. I mean if you hire someone from a firm where they currently are part of the reason you're hiring them is because they have a particular area of expertise and definitely know what their current employer's code in this area looks like. That's WHY you hire them, so they can do awesome stuff for you instead. The point of the article is that in doing this kind of crap Goldman makes it extremely uncertain for programmers who go to work there if they will be able to go and work somewhere else exporting the skill set and tangible knowledge of code they acquired at Goldman to a new workplace. This uncertainty makes programmers NOT want to work for Goldman and will definitely kill Goldman. Bershidsky has got it right.

I completely disagree, the type of craftsmen you're referring to will cease to exist at the company in the future. The very concept of craftsmanship is antiquated by the idea of intelligent machines. That is, machines that can learn.

No matter how hard a human tries to "obsess over every single detail" they will simply be unable to compete with a machine intelligence in this regard. All the things you listed are so obviously suited to be tasks that intelligent machines can excel and surpass humans at. Even unintelligent machines would fare quite well against a human at all the tasks you listed.

You may argue that there's an art to craftsmanship that machines "will never duplicate the creativity of humans." I hear that like 20 times a week and it's not true. This falsehood lies in a flawed premise. The premise that the machines doing art/crafstmaship will seek to "replicate" human creativity is simply false. Human creativity doesn't necessarily replicate the creativity of other humans; why would a machine creativity need to replicate? Many intelligent machines are already making art online. Machines do not need to replicate. Intelligent machines can create on their own, independently. People are doing this with twitter bots now.

Notice I use the word "machine intelligence" and not just machine. A machine is process that has been animated in the physical world. A machine intelligence is fundamentally different. It learns and is better than we are at most (if not all) things. I understand that this eventuality is terrifying to people. Being scared of the inevitable doesn't stop it. We need to be thinking about this now so we can make plans to figure out what do with humans once these machines proliferate through our society.

As an aside I also love Japanese culture. I had the opportunity to travel to Japan after high school. It was great.

Soon...soon... pets robotic white cat

This is nice PR but to imply that this is anything more than that is silly. These humans are clearly just improving the robots.

That is the case with Dodd-Frank. That is not usually the case with regulation. Normally it goes "here are the rules, execute." Dodd-Frank is a nightmare exactly because they just have an outline full of blanks. It turns out regulators are not that good at 1. Enforcing regulation or 2. Writing regulation. The reason for this is because they have no incentive to.

See my response talking about legislature regulation versus regulators whose job it is to enforce that regulation (It is the comment above).

That's wrong. That kind of regulation comes from the legislature. It's an outside force. The effects of a regulator's actions on their ability to join banks afterwards are measured independently of legislature regulation. What I'm talking about is the people whose job it is to enforce that regulation (the people we call "regulators"). Their incentive is to not enforce it as strongly as they could or should. They "adapt" their policy enforcement to fit what people believe in industry right now, which is why they let all these banks peddle bad loans and commit massive fraud. The reason they "adapt" is contained in my original post.

There's no real incentive for regulators to regulate if you think about it. If you DO regulate you're less likely to have exit jobs to Wall Street. If you DON'T regulate and things go well, everything will be good and you'll go through the revolving door to work for big banks and big bucks. If you DON'T regulate and everything goes very badly (you know like a financial meltdown) it's "not your fault."

The reason is that it was a systematic structural problem. Instead of picturing that chain of command (the one you just listed) inside one organization. Imagine EACH step of that chain is actually a different organization that handles one part of that chain of command. Its like if people want euthanasia in Spain, they distribute the task of getting the arsenic among 20 people so none of them can be prosecuted for a crime. One person takes the vial from 20th street to 15th street. One person enters the building. One person walks up the stairs. etc. Their individual part is so small and they have no knowledge of other parts; it's hard to prosecute them for murder. Finance is kind of like that too. They split everything up; it's hard to prosecute.

This is sweet. My brother and I were thinking about wild ideas like this. We couldn't be more happy to see someone as awesome as google doing this.

Even though the kid probably won't get a felony it is absurd that the government can even use that bargaining chip in this scenario to gain leverage. This is the same kind of garbage they used against Swartz.

Superintelligence by definition does a better job. Think of it this way:

You're a human; how good are you at walking from point A to point B? You're actually quite good at it. You open up google maps (a human invention) and walk to point B. It only takes a small number of humans to maintain the infrastructure for you to find point B.

Now imagine you are an ant. How good are you at finding point B? You're absolutely crap at it. You need to organize an entire complex system of pheromones and ant-conga lines just to find point B (usually a food location). Most of your colony is devoted to this organizational task of just finding point B from point A.

That task that is all consuming for the ant and takes the full attention of the colony is peanuts to us humans, it's so freakin' easy.

By definition a super intelligence eclipses our conception of the universe. If you took the humans who had to try really hard at X, Y, or Z tasks, these X, Y, Z tasks would be peanuts to the AI, they would be so easy the AI doesn't even think about them. The same way ants try really hard and organize their entire colony to find point B and humans don't even think about finding point B.

Ok, fine. PLATO was a super cool more generalist machine that happens to not be a personal computer. My use of personal computers was just an example that I thought would get a point across about the evolution of technology. The fact that PLATO existed and was very different than what came before it (as per all the cool stuff you listed) if anything strengthens the argument I was making. Generalist machines were a big step up from what came before, orders of magnitude better. A super-AI will also be unpredictably orders of magnitude better than what we've done so far.

Yeah I thought about that when I was writing the reply. I don't really consider that a generalized use case. Is it more generalized? Yes. Computing itself, however, can be argued to be a specialized task. My computer today doesn't do "computing" it lets me read news stories, it lets me talk on skype, it lets me send mail, it lets me have philosophical discussions on hackernews. The personal computer is so clearly a generalized machine whereas those time sharing rigs back in the 60s were clearly not. They were specialized tools for programmers.

I agree; that is part of his argument. Obviously though it is a completely flawed argument. Up until the creation of the personal computer most machines were specialists. They were large computers designed for specific computation tasks or machines made specifically for manufacturing certain kinds of goods. Generalist computers didn't have much precedent. That's kind of the point of new technology. It's not necessarily predicated by something that came before. It is orders of magnitude better.

To me this argument has historically less validity than creative people dreaming about singular, binary acts of creation. Historically those people have won.

Oates' argument generally seems to be "It won't be scary because it won't be." He rejects the premise of Musk, Gates, etc. He basically says we won't be able to build a superhuman AI. All his arguments are then predicated in this assumption. The assumption that we won't build a superhuman AI is just wrong.

For example:

> [Would this superhuman intelligence inherently go nuclear, or would it likely just slack off a little at work or, in extreme cases, compose rap music in Latin?]

This statement assumes an AI on the caliber of a human intelligence. Making rap music in Latin is something a human would do. A superhuman AI is beyond a human intelligence in the same way a human's capacity for thought and tasks is beyond that on an ant.

The premise of a superhuman AI has at least some evidence supporting it. Oates offers no solid evidence to his rejection of the premise. His argument is therefore kinda bad (but not necessarily incorrect).

This is clearly a superior format for explaining papers. Research should be accessible and it isn't. It really doesn't make much sense to have the academic profession riddled with "abstractese." That is, language that even educated people have trouble understanding without a definition sheet.

Yeah I just thought it was kind of funny that he included a scenario where someone would desire to shoot him down.

This was on his website. "Let them know you demand an honest government that works for the people - and you oppose shooting me down. (If you are in favor shooting me down, call that number, but wait until tomorrow.)"

Is there a list somewhere of problems/bugs that have been discovered with dropbox?