smosher

As someone else mentioned, C# is a big deal now and comes with a degree of safety over C++. I don't expect to see Rust in the pole position on the whole, but it could easily displace C++ at Id Software since Carmack has been shopping for an alternative, and elsewhere (especially if he runs with it first.)

But I think C++'s share is losing ground, and Unity is an impressive platform. The asm.js buzz seems to whisper promises about ES and browsers becoming a serious AAA gaming platform. If FFOS gets anywhere it may supply the necessary voltage. So the lay of the land is anyone's guess, but all the variables eat into C++'s % share even if only by expanding the market around it.

I've been assured that it's the plan. I have no idea how much of it works right now though. I've only done one build with the new rt and it doesn't involve tasks.

The problem with Cantor space is you simply can't even begin to approximate Chaitin's constant, but it seems like you could by using a countable numbering (all else being equal.) Of course that would blow everything up, so the takeaway is there is something very important which I'm not convinced we've learned yet.

Worse, I don't think you're prepared to prove that a mostly pure-neuron simulation is incapable of giving rise to that certain complex quality apparently far removed from the level of the simulation.

Can you elaborate on this class of 'something'? There are intelligent behaviours that can be reproduced this way, so without more specifics I feel like you're making the same mistake you're condemning.

I disagree. You could use the same argument to admit any old troll. As someone who's often critical of Go, I found the quality of TFA to be too low to be worthwhile. It gets a lot of things wrong and in my opinion breezes past many of the real problems.

More importantly, with new languages people are very quick to sling whatever FUD they can regurgitate against languages they've decided they don't want eating up the mindshare they'd rather some other language had.

I think this is what people will ultimately focus on when considering Go. Many of the complaints are a product of type weaknesses in the language, voiced by people who had assumed that a modern static language wouldn't have that fault. Others tend not to mind because they lack that expectation, and regard the dynamic behaviour you can get as a feature. The argument about shared mutable state goes the same way, but for some concurrent but non-parallel code it might be convenient.

I can easily see people picking Go when moving from Python. But not when moving from a static language with a stronger, safer type system.

Also, as burntsushi points out, it does require more sophistication in the type system. I doubt they're trying to sell a naively simplistic type system (sophistication often makes it easier to use), but when Go was announced the feature they seemed to be selling the hardest was short compilation times. I think that feature is the seed of this behaviour.

That leaves ~ and & which you don't normally need to think about, you could get pretty far writing ~ for all allocations and & in all fn signatures. You could write a video game like this with the SFML bindings for example.

mut doesn't really complicate things in terms of which pointer you're picking. I've screwed up mut here and there, but I feel like it's its own subject.

That's true, but it's usually part of the boilerplate. I'm not suggesting it's related to the perceived problem, but every research position I've been in has had a clause like that. One place even offered to change it for me, saying "oh that's just some boilerplate the lawyers used."

Yet apparently it collapses at that point. Unless that's solved we might as well be talking about birthday balloons here.

I wonder about that. I can see healing and plasticity going a very long way over time, but intuition is telling me there's not enough plasticity in the wiring of critical autonomic functions.

I don't deny that at all, in fact it is quite precisely what I endorse. Notice that the term consciousness lies on the left side, the excluded part. On the right side, you use the better-defined term, awareness. A definition that comes with better philosophical understanding. TFA, however, talks of qualia.

We might need to first answer to such questions before we gain any new insights of more philosophical nature.

I would say "different" rather than "more." Philosophy doesn't mean "weird stuff we don't really understand" and it can often be as boring as the implications of simple arithmetic or even the logic used in scientific endeavors. I wouldn't want to throw that out in the name of progress either.

I cannot agree the results are meaningless or "only reaffirm our prejudices".

The results described by the article and supported here are of the form "consciousness is X" where no question was asked that is answerable directly in terms of X, and no reconciliation has been made. That is the sense of meaninglessness I'm talking about. If you're still in doubt, or think that's somehow unimportant, grab the bull by the horns and deal with the implication that this is somehow ultimately a measure of qualia.

My only point is really that the lack of a great definition of consciousness doesn't diminish the value of research like the one cited here.

In that phrasing I am almost in agreement, if it wasn't for some of the claims made. Some very interesting things are being measured, but to go from these measurements to things like qualia is a leap I can't justify. A correlation between these measures and alertness, intelligence and kinds of awareness are easy to establish or contradict, and better yet: given those connections who is going to say "yeah but what are these results over here? it looks like manifest experience!"—?

I'm not looking for a why—the common complaint about gravity—I just want all the whats to match up. The meaninglessness is in reference to the question of consciousness. If you supply this to the asker, they could rightly ask, "sure, but what about my question?" Perhaps there is no reconciliation and you might want to complain that the question is nonsense—that complaint would make a better answer than a collection of irrelevant facts.

If you look at the formulation it starts out as a magical-seeming property, yet the definitions and processes do nothing to demystify that property. If you look at that process carefully you'll find the deceit: this is not an answer to the question of consciousness as asked. With the right philosophical treatment there might be hope of reconciliation, but without it the concept is just going to remain magical, without meaningful conclusions.

Aether is a great example, one I had in mind. Consciousness is very much like aether in some ways. It may well be that the only useful scientific thing to say about it at the end of the day is: it is not a useful concept to science. Much better than the contrivances offered up with no compelling connection to the subject.

The last word in TFA is 'qualia'. This is the problem. Canonical definitions of that term describe it as impossible to measure, or simply ineffable, which effectively puts it off the table for a scientific treatment. Regardless of what you think of what should constitute a scientific concept, the implication that these measurements alone elucidate an ineffable phenomenon is exactly the kind of thing that stinks of bullshit.

It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider candidates for consciousness, other than to reaffirm our prejudices.

In other words, there's no such thing as a good scientific definition without the philosophical context. You can have as accurate an arbitrary measure as you like, but that doesn't imbue it equally arbitrarily with your desired meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#...

The fact is Wayland is less capable in this area and the project refuses to admit to it. If all you want is VNC that's a win for you, but it's insulting to say it's objectively better when many of us find it strictly worse.

X is by all means a Rube Goldberg machine and nobody's contesting that. That doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath water is the better way to solve the dirty baby problem, even if it is easier—who needs soap when you can just eliminate the baby?

In actuality VNC is equivalent to the worst-case option X has in terms of rendering. If you wanted something else it's just a bad joke.