umilegenio

I agree with your first comment, but disagree on the second one. It is weird to say that the robot wanted to eliminate a threat, most likely it was simply not programmed to avoid obstacles given the environemnt it was in. He ascribes an intention that was not there. To be fair, it is a quote from a book and not the words chosen directly by the author, but he could have clarified.

The second one seems fair: he is describing the result of what the Tesla Autopilot is doing. I do not think that he means to say that the Autopilot is understanding that there is a red light but then it makes a consciuous decision to itgnore it. He is just saying that the robot is malfunctioning, as it should be clear from context:

  "Today’s AI-related robot deaths are no different from the robot accidents of the past. Those industrial robots malfunctioned, and human operators trying to assist were killed in unexpected ways. [..] Malfunctioning Teslas on Autopilot have deviated from their advertised capabilities by misreading road markings, suddenly veering into other cars or trees, crashing into well-marked service vehicles, or ignoring red lights, stop signs, and crosswalks".

I do not think there is a more neutral way of describing the events.

That's true, but it does not automatically make them popular on the platform

I am the original author. I don't disagree with anything you said here, but it does not seem it contradicts what I am trying to say. Probably my article was a bit unclear on this point.

The connection between freedom of speech and privacy was just an example of how privacy affect other rights, too. I used it because I did not want to be too abstract. I used just one example, because I did not want to write too much on this. I wanted to write something that could be shared and read by a few people, rather than just hardcore privacy enthusiast.

Actually I really like your observations. Frankly this is another way (maybe a better one) to say what I was thinking:

>Privacy is about denying other people the information that they may use to obtain power over you in some way.

I might have been unclear on this aspect. My point was that privacy can affect other rights in complex ways, including, as a way of example, freedom of speech.

In the example I was talking about in the article, I was trying to say that nowadays people have different norms and opinions on what is fair. That is great, however this means that without privacy I can hurt you simply by sharing something about you with a a certain community. For instance, I can take something you said in private, or one fact about you (i.e., you are a member of party X, or have a certain sexuality, or belong to a certain religion) and share with a community that will misinterpret or attack you for that.

In the past we allowed the press to violate privacy of important people for something nefarious (i.e., they hunt people for sport). Now everybody has the power to violate privacy of anybody for any reason they see fit.

So, now maybe we should forbid everyone to violate the privacy of anyone, otherwise we will lose freedom of speech, because will be afraid to say anything for fear of being taken out of context. Maybe we should all agree that if you disagree with somebody you cannot call a mob to defend your opinion, but you should call them with your speech. That is not an obvious choice to make. As others have commented, what about actually powerful people? Just disagreeing with them will not change their opinion, because they are more powerful than you. So, I am not saying that is easy to understand what to do, but that privacy can actually change how we use other rights.

> I don't get the conception that the top problem our world have is people being judged about what they said.

It is not just what we say, they also judge who we are in their own terms.

> It's the news cycle, the constant barrage of irrelevant information. The murder of effective discussion and thought.

I agree that it is a big problem. In some ways we are the most educated civilizations in the history of mankind and yet public discourse is the stupidest it has ever been. I think this happens also [1] because everything we said is taken out of context, therefore only the simplest ideas can travel among the public. Imagine that you are a politician that want to disagree with their own party, what do you think people will hear more probably: 1) they are a traitor 2) they fully support our cause, however they disagree with this particular course of action because X

Without spaces and community in which we can discuss freely and with trust, complex opinions are difficult to form and defend. Since most discussions are either moved online or are easily shareable online by even one party we need strong privacy norms to allow such discussions to happen.

[1] it is not the only reason, of course

Thanks for sharing them.

My argument is that without privacy we cannot build and defend other rights. Privacy allows to define private, social and public spaces with different rules. Without privacy your private stuff can be shared with the public. You could lose your jobs because you said something that your community does not approve. Privay in the modern world is like borders. Without borders we cannot really decide which laws to apply, because anybody could come in and go, so it would become impossible to enforce any kind of law.

It is not really a big part of the thesis, rather an observation.

What you say about private communities is also true. However, I was referring more to the fact that everybody seem to nonchalantly use violent words and dangerous statements to express their disagreement, i.e., people are not just wrong, they are evil bastards that must be removed from public life and the nation itself.

Well, as I said the article is my opinion. So, let's agree to disagree.

In my experience real anarchy, in the way you describe, has never been achieved. So, when I hear that it reminds me when people say that real comunism is great, it is just that the URSS was bad, fake communism (it happens here in Italy, not sure if that happens where you are). The only historical anarchy that I know is the one where there is no control. Maybe we can do a better version in the future, but for now that it is what happened.

To be fair, I am Italian, so maybe I am overreacting on the whole barbarians thing.

I am the original author. That are good points. I think that punishment would mostly comes through social interactions (i.e., we should chastise people) or technical means (i.e., you are banned from sharing content for X days), but also fines for the most egregious offenders. We fine people all the time.

> If I was flat out telling my family I didn't like race X and wished that religion Y could be outlawed, and then shared in the public realm that racists are terrible and that freedom of religion for all is paramount...shouldn't someone be able to call me out on it? And if not me, imagine a person of some power or influence: don't we want to know when someone's public political stance is different to how they really feel?

You can call out people in private for the bad stuff they share in private. However, you are right it is no so clear cut: we need to find balance. The issue is that making a special exception for powerful and influential people it is dangerous because it is not clear who are. In some way almost anybody has some authority: you might be a parent, the go-to guy for technical things in a community, the administrator of a forum or a open-source project, etc.

Remote working can be great for companies that are large and/or in the development/web service sector. In large companies most people already interact remotely (i.e., emails and calls). With all that this entails: clear communication, well documented processes, etc. So a good part of the work is already remote, in some sense. You only need to understand what part of the rest can be made remote.

Companies that work primarily with development/web service probably already work in good part with (remote) software. So working remotely is an easy step.

In short, I think that basically companies like Facebook are the one that have it easiest in being remote-first companies. And the ones that would get the most benefit from it. So, it is great that they adopted a remote-first approach, when they literally had no alternative.

However, we should remember that there are still lots of companies and people that will never thrive in a remote-first environment. And these might very well be the majority.

It's hard to reform when many Americans are in an abusive relationship with their own party. A Pew poll in 2017[1] showed that the majority of the most partisan supporters choose their own party because they hate the other one, rather than they like their own. You cannot make reform on destruction and hate. There is little positive energy to create really new proposals.

[1] https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-animosity...

I feel that these attacks on the rationality (and intelligence) of the average person are misguided. Rationality means evaluating the information provided to you. If you do not give importance to any qualitative information (e.g., taste), it makes sense to evaluate them on the quantitative information alone (i.e., lower fat) which is not relevant for many people.

I would go as far as to say that even in cases such as the gluten-free fad, people are somewhat justified. Producers started saying that their products were gluten-free to serve the customers that needed that information (i.e., celiacs). However, the average person did not know about celiac disease, so they reasonably thought that the information was for them. The logical conclusion was that gluten was bad. Now, that is wrong, but to be fair how are you supposed to know that? You are not a dietitian.

It's not a matter of rationality, but that is difficult to evaluate information if you do not understand the context in which is produced.

That seems great. I've read a comparison of different approaches to contact tracing. The one chosen by Singapore seems to be the best compromise between privacy and effectiveness: the data stays on your phone, but you can trace and warn people you have contacted.

in Italian - https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/03/24/coronavirus-app...

True, mine is a generalization. However Italian geography also lead to heavy concentration of people in limited areas. Lombardy, the worst hit region, has a population density of 420/km2. Look at this map of Italian geography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy#/media/File:Italy_topogr...

I am not sure how much matters, but Italy has a high population density, higher than China: 201/km2. China has 145/km2, while United States has 36/km2. This mean that people are more widespread, so it should be easier to isolate parts of United States than it is to isolate parts of Italy, in case there are problematic areas. In short, New York might become a center of epidemic, but probably not the whole United States.

Basically this essay is about the issue that many internet services become monopolies and the negative effect of this phenomenon. The author argues that we have to create pro-market regulations and models of development (e.g., favors the creation of services that are open, like email, instead of one closed, like Whatsapp) that favors the creation of competition between different players.

Let's agree that is feasible, but unlikely.

It was more of a lighthearted joke about the attitude that many have toward JavaScript than an attack on the language itself.

I have nothing against JavaScript, although it is not a splendid example of design it certainly works for what was designed for. But I think it also undeniable that would choose something else for many tasks, if they had the option.

If you wanted, you could also use JavaScript for an entire operating systems just for JavaScript[1]. However this does not mean that it is good idea to do so.

[1] https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS

There is no need to be rude.

TypeScript was used as an example of a well-known language that currently is transpiled to JavaScript. I am not saying that TypeScript will surely be compiled to WebAssembly, just that it could.

TypeScript is designed for development of large applications. It is a superset of JavaScript both because this facilitates learning, but also because there was really not an alternative. In the end you had to compile to JavaScript. It is not hard to imagine a language with the same objective of TypeScript that is compiled to WebAssembly. Furthermore, if TypeScript was compiled to WebAssembly you could use it wherever there was a platform for the WebAssembly format. So if somebody created a project to consume WASM binary files and execute them from within .NET assemblies[1], you could use TypeScript outside the browser and node.

[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/NETAndWebAssemblyIsThisTheFut...

The end game is to have a WebAssembly module that you can load just like you now load a JS script. When we get there, there will also be (probably[1]) easy methods to access the DOM from WebAssembly.

At the moment the easiest way would probably be to write some glue code in JavaScript (see Let’s write Pong in WebAssembly https://medium.com/@mbebenita/lets-write-pong-in-webassembly...).

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

You are right only for the average website. If you are building applications delivered through the web, like games and advanced webmail, it can take a few seconds right now. With WebAssembly you could basically create all desktop applications on the web and it would be perfectly reasonable to take a few seconds to load one of them.

I agree. At the moment you can use WebAssembly, but it is not exactly user friendly. Effectively they have only build tools that can work inside other tools or as a part of an existing toolchain.

However, the end game is to be able to load a WebAssembly module just like you load a JS script. So, we are going to get there, but it will take some time.

Thanks for your comment. We are going to look into it.

That's true up to a point. We wrote the article for programmers that had no previous knowledge, so we avoided stuff that is too hard. To such people stuff that is too advanced would look cool, but it would also be impractical to use.

However, we are thinking about creating a more advanced article on a later date.

Thanks. Well, there are interesting things that we had to cut because they were too advanced for an introductory article. We were thinking about making a new article for them in a few months. And Natural Language Generation would be another great topic to talk about.

However, if you already have experience in the topic we would be happy if you would like to write a guest post for us.

The interesting thing about word2vec is that is an unsupervised method that build vectors to represent each word in a way that makes easy to find relationship between them.

There is a video by the creator of Gensim on word2vec and frieds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTp3P2UnTfQ

We didn't include it, simply because it relies on machine learning and we wanted to show simpler methods.

> - Answering a question by returning a search result from a large body of texts. E.g. "How do I change the background color of a page in Javascript?" > - Answering a question, using a large body of facts. Like search, but now it gives a precise answer.

That is essentially a Natural Language Interface. There are simple ways to implement one for bots that receives simple commands[1]. The problem is that it quickly become very hard if you are trying to do something more open ended that a bot. So, there was simply no room to include it.

> - Improving the readability of a text. The article only mentions "understanding how difficult to read is a text".

The issue is that the formulas to measure the readability of a text cannot really be used to suggest improvements. That's because the user ends up focusing on improving the score instead of improving the text. To suggest improvements you need a much more sophisticate system.

> - Establishing relationships between entities in a body of text. E.g. we could build a fact-graph from sentences like "Burning coal increases CO2", and "CO2 increase induces global warming". Useful also in medical literature where there are millions of pathways.

This is one of the things that were axed, because in some sense it is simple if you just want to link together concepts without any causality, i.e. stuff that happens together. To do that you could link named entity recogniton (to find entities) and a simple way to find a relationship between words (i.e., they happen in the same phrase therefore they have related). However a more sophisticated form of the process, like the one that results in the Knowledge Graph[2] would be quite hard to do.

> - Finding and correcting spelling/grammatical errors.

That's a great idea, we will add how to detect spelling errors.

[1] https://medium.com/swlh/a-natural-language-user-interface-is...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Graph

Thanks for your comment! Now, we have fixed the issue.