631 karma · joined July 11, 2019
In the US, with ~250 million people being eligible, a $1000 UBI would cost ~$3 trillion. That's almost the entire budget of the US. How is this even remotely realistic right now? Even if you can cut other spending in half due to it, you'd need an additional $1.5 trillion in "income" essentially. Is that something that would even be possible? How many rich people are there to tax?
And in some cases, that might still end up being much more lucrative than a "normal job". But I'm sure that in many cases, it doesn't - we just don't hear about it, because they're still rich, and nobody really knows what they're really doing anyway.
But yeah, if you live on full time minimum wage here that's ~1200€ per month, of which probably 500-800 depending on where you live will go to rent. And if it's 800, it would probably be 1800 if everyone got 1000€ per month. So in that sense, he might be right.
On the other hand some people just might actually quit their job with 1000€ per month and live somewhere further away from cities, since they don't have to live there to work. And maybe that would incentivize employers to try to create more work outside cities. Seems almost impossible to really predict the large scale effects here.
There are about 200 different ways to be honest, stemming from the unfortunate situation that the most common advice, "use exceptions in exceptional situations", is actively harmful.
Let's take a "Connection" class for example. You'd initialize it with an IpEndpoint, or something to that effect. Some people think "well I'm writing a download script so if I can't connect the script can't continue, so that is exceptional" - so they throw an exception in the constructor and catch it somewhere in main. Other people are writing something more complicated and they think "being unable to establish a connection is normal, I'll just make a factory function for this and wrap the Connection constructor". Which leads to completely different paradigms in the same situation but with different environments - and those two decisions are both good, there are tons of decisions that aren't!
This is compounded by the fact that the C++ standard library only uses 2 kinds of resources: Memory and Files. And they use different kinds of error handling. Well, memory allocation always throws (at least it's consistent here), but the iostream error handling is, uh, interesting? Streams don't throw by default, however you can enable them to throw at runtime, but they also store their error state inside. It's a mess really.
Oh and also the std::logic_error exists and gets thrown by standard library functions, but a lot of advice around exceptions says that you're not supposed to use exceptions for programming errors, that should be handled by assertions.
And then there are of course people who just disable exceptions. Some disable exceptions but still use the standard library and just kind of hope that everything will still work?
So yeah, it's a mess. That's partly why proposals like this would help - if you can make the actual throwing of exceptions cheap, the advice of "use exceptions for exceptional situations" goes away instead becomes "use exceptions for every kind of error handling". Which would be much more consistent. And people wouldn't have an excuse to disable exceptions anymore, at least in the long run.
For example, since constructors can't return error values reasonably, you would have to make them all private and use static factory functions, or similar workarounds. It's certainly possible, but much less pleasant to work with.
But we don't even know if it's theoretically possible to create a baseball amount of negative energy. As long as that question hasn't been answered, any discussion about practical applications seems rather pointless.
The reason for that is as you say, they're playing the long game here. They know it won't make money, not today, not next year, not in 3 years. But in 10 years it could make billions. And getting actual user data and feedback early while you're building the architecture is probably worth a lot.
The reason some people think that is absolutely insane and ridiculous is simply perception. I switched from 100 Hz CRTs to 120, then 165 Hz LCDs. Console games to me are unplayable already. Obviously, Stadia in it's current form is entire useless to me, no matter what game I'm playing because it just feels bad.
However, people who mostly played 30 FPS console games their entire lives, can usually play on stadia perfectly fine. The input lag isn't that much worse.
In this case however, the low quality was easy to identify for everyone. Just go to the website:
>Happy learning and keep coding !!!.
A space in front of three exclamation marks followed by a period. Only psychopaths would be able to write something like that.
It's honestly the best we can ever hope for in a free but commercial product. Everything with better privacy would either have to run almost server free or cost money. Both of which would probably kill mainstream adoption for different reasons.
Not to mention that even if everyone was willing to pay $1 per month for a messaging service, now people are instantly identified with a bank account. And even if you allowed bitcoin, since 99.9% of people would just use your bank account, not using one would instantly put a spotlight on you. And who sends messages to whom is still going through their servers. To actually get significantly better privacy, you'd have to essentially use the Tor network or something.
Microsoft probably won't be much better though in the long run...
Well the blog post isn't really primarily about his specific issue, it's about the systems being severely lacking. A ticket won't resolve that issue.
Just put up cameras with facial recognition everywhere, require every citizen to have biometric IDs (face from multiple angles, fingerprints, DNA), make covering your face illegal and bam you catch like 99% of bike thieves.
>Would ransomware have taken off like it has without bitcoin?
Probably, yeah. Gift cards work well too for example (they're just not as convenient), and I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to transfer money too if you're willing to incur like 50% transaction losses.
>Is there some technical change to bitcoin that could make it less attractive to bad guys?
Bitcoin already tracks every transaction ever. You'd have to somehow prevent mixers from existing, but I'm not sure how that'd be possible.
No, you can't. The problem isn't training the AI to actually play all the heroes, that's the easy part (and also it's not even required to play the full game, no human can play every single hero), the problem is training the AI to play against all the heroes. That's the challenge - and that's the part that doesn't scale linearly at all. The more heroes the opponent can pick, the more complex your "behavior tree" has to become to think about every possible combination of what they could do.
>you are relying on a computer having human limitations to show that it is superior.
No, I rely on a computer playing the same actual game and not cheat. Because that's pretty much exactly what they're doing right now. It's like modding the game so that every animation is color coded by if it would currently hit you, every minion perfectly marked if it is in execution range, every champion running around with circles that show their ability ranges, with your champion being color coded depending on which ranges, etc. (Except actually even worse than that.)
Again, in the actual real world an AI might have a 360 degree view of the environment, but it still has cameras and it still needs to do naturally imperfect object recognition algorithms on everything - it doesn't just get floating point values for every object's position and trajectory from God.
>When TeamDotaBot2000 is winning every game on the DotA ladder
If TeamDotaBot2000 wasn't directly affiliated with Valve, they would literally get banned for cheating. Because they're not interacting with the game like a normal player would, and they are doing things even a perfect, god-given AI playing the game through the same interface couldn't.
>it is expected that computers beat humans in any field with formally defined rules and objectives.
I expect this to be eventually true in any field. By so much that humans will be fundamentally useless in terms of advancing knowledge, culture, or anything in between. But if that's going to happen in 20, 50, 100 or 10,000 years really isn't clear to me, and neither is that all they'd have to do is put a realistic amount of hardware into their current approach to learn the entire game. The complexity of this task is definitely scaling exponentially, and just like you can't just throw twice the compute at a 128-bit cryptographic key because it worked so well for 64-bits, you can't just throw more compute at a game to learn to play against more champions.
That's an interesting interpretation. My interpretation is that they simply weren't able to do it yet (not for a lack of trying though), and so they gave up. It's not obvious at all to me that there is a way to simply scale their approach to the real game. I mean, certainly there is a way with infinite computing power, but it's not clear to me that even with all the computing power on earth currently this approach would work. 18 out of 117 heroes does reduce complexity quite a lot, especially when you pick ones with less complex mechanics.
>They weren't even trying to abuse the reaction time of the computer
They introduced a constant reaction time, but they still "abused" the interface they are provided. If this was a task in the real world, the AI would have the same interface as humans: The screen. They would have to move the screen and run object recognition algorithms on the rendered values, and they would have to "click" on units (not physically) instead of being able to internally select them. This would introduce completely different (and more realistic) reaction time parameters, because if a hero starts an animation it might not be immediately clear which animation it is in the first 5 frames, but the API will provide the value immediately.
AlphaStar's strength dropped considerably for example when they realized that the AI being able to perceive the entire map at once was an unfair advantage and restricted it so that it had to move the camera around. But still even AlphaStar is using an API instead of just the rendered output, which enables things like selecting units that are hidden behind other units, which for a human player is literally impossible without moving it out of the way first.
I think for AI to be able to claim that it is better at a game than humans, the AI ought to be playing the actual game, and use the same interface. (Not necessarily physically, you don't need a camera and a robot, but the AI's input should be the rendered output of the game, and the AI's output should be mouse movement / key strokes.)
You might think that would be a trivial and useless exercise (like it would be in Chess/Go), but I'm really not convinced of that for video games. There are a lot of examples where even playing a frame-by-frame recording of a fight you just can't tell what exactly is going on in a fight until a couple frames later, but the API will always provide floating-point accurate data of everything. This is a huge advantage that just doesn't translate into real world tasks when the AI has to use cameras and sensors to make sense of the world (in automated driving for example) just like we have to.
This is pretty cool, can save a lot of time in some cases, and doesn't disappoint because object recognition (even by humans) is unreliable by nature.
>use an online translator to translate almost anything in any language (including idioms) using something like google translate
That's debatable at best. Google Translate at least is still horrible, to the point where it is actually pretty much completely useless, at translating Asian languages to English. For longer texts, even German to English or Spanish to English produces a lot of nonsense, although it is usually at least somewhat intelligible if you're familiar with the sort of mistakes that Google Translate tends to make.
Anecdotally, I don't use Google Translate any differently than I did 7 years ago. It's good for single words or expressions, it's okay for single sentences if you are aware of it's pitfalls, it's pretty useless for large articles unless all you want is getting a general idea of what the article is talking about.
>AI Dungeon
I mean everything we've seen from AI Dungeon was hilarious because of it's nonsensical flaws. If those flaws can somehow be removed in the future we'll be stuck with a version where every individual sentence kind of makes sense but there is no coherent connection or story line, i.e. a product that nobody would use.
If by "well-defined" you mean "complete information", then yes. If by well-defined you mean... well-defined, then no. Humans are better at a lot of things still, including video games for example. OpenAI has been working for years on a DotA AI, and while very technologically interesting, it still can only play (well) with and against a fraction of heroes and mechanics, and even within those limitations humans have quickly been able to find weaknesses and outmaneuver it.
AI really hasn't over the last 5 years (and probably won't during the next 5) changed the world that much. There are some problem domains that saw big interesting leaps (mainly image recognition, image reconstruction and game AI), but that's about it.
Self-driving cars, if they ever come to market properly, will be the biggest change. And that's certainly a big change, but it's not really the "software industry revolutionizing" change that some people seem to expect.
>openssh makes the situation worse because +even+ if the key is already in your host file and it's just the ip/domain that changed it will not tell you that it recognises the key.
Although even if there somehow are hard questions, I'm not sure understanding unsigned arithmetic would have helped whoever wrote that code. Because I think if you asked that person "what does this unsigned type do with -5 C?" the answer would have been pretty obvious.
It's just difficult - and while interviews are decent, whiteboard tasks are usually useless. If you have your own or contributed to open source projects, that's pretty good too for assessing code quality, but not everyone has that.
Ultimately paying for assignments would probably be the best solution, but not everyone can do that either.