Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"maths + languages first, humanities next, arts and crafts way down"
Languages not part of the humanities? And, although I'm not a mathematician it's quite clear to me that real mathematicians are creative. But even more than creative, children are curious. I very much doubt that schools are against curiosity although plenty of people outside school will be.
I'm convinced that real intelligence comes from the fact that we are physical entities interacting with the physical environment around us. We start out, newly born with millions of sensory receptors - rods and cones, taste buds, olfactory receptors, those cells in the cochlea, touch, heat, pain receptors, proprioceptors all feeding into a growing brain and spend the first months correlating those inputs to start building a mental model of the world around us, the perceived world. We have a sense of self stemming from our connection to the world.
As we refine it we can use it to understand that external world, plan and carry out our interactions with it to do and get what we need and want. Most o our vertebrate brethren do the same. That's the core of our intelligence.
What we humans have evolved is the extra capacity to communicate symbolically with language so that we can add to our model by listening or reading to others telling us about things they have encountered and we haven't and also to add more from our imagination and to reason more elaborately about our mental model. But that mental model of the environment is the core of our intelligence. The symbolic layer is just an add-on.
What ML and attempts at AGI are targetting is just that add-on layer. Without the perceived world underpinning it they're not going to get there. You and I can read a description of a room, a landscape, a person or experience, fictional or otherwise and add it to our mental model because we have seen and experienced these things directly during our training of our brains in those early years and beyond. A notional disembodied AGI can't have that connection to give a sense of self or an understanding of anything that's communicated to it. No amount of description can give it the sense of what a drink is because it's never felt the weight of the vessel and contents, never tasted it, never sensed the tempperature and never swallowed it. It is and must remain deficient in kind, not just in degree from a real intelligence.
"Not honouring the licences."
The licences don't actually require you to contribute back. What the GPL does is require you to provide the source to anyone to whom you've provided a binary* and to allow sharing of that source under the same terms on which you receive that.
Who do we find avoiding that to the maximum extent they can manage? That distinctly non-Chinese business Red Hat/IBM.
* Permissive licences don't even require that.
Let's see. If you ask it to make economic predictions it's not too bad* taking into account training information plus information about an event that happened since the training data.
Now extend that to the real world with training data available up to present. In that case the equivalent of the invasion of Ukraine is a future event that hasn't yet happened, may or may not happen and can only be taken into account if you can predict what's going to happen. So if you can predict what's going to happen in the future then the model can predict what's going to happen in the future. There must be a flaw in there somewhere.
* Ask n economists for a prediction you'll get at least n + 1 so "not too bad" is a low bar.
How come they limit the case to just Apple what about all the other "stores" ?
Let's say we have Apple store and ANOther store. We now have 3 groups of developers: 1 Apple only 2 Apple & ANOther, 3) ANOther only
So we now have, in the one trial 1 & 2 vs Apple and 2 & 3 vs ANOther. Group 2's lawyers are fighting two different adveraries at the same time. Jury are trying to keep rack of who's suing whom. 1 & 3 are sitting wondering what's going on when the adversary that's not theirs is being argued about. Add further combinatorial explosion if more stores are being sued at the same time.
No, can't imagine why it's just Apple being sued in this case.
It's a bit tricky in that BSD had to remove any bits of AT&T code but AIUI it did evolve from the original academic distribution Unix tape and Ken Thompson spent a sabbatical year there plus a lot of contributions such as vi went back into Unix. On the whole I'd regard it as Unix, even if it isn't UNIX.
Unless you come from the Spen valley part of the textile industry specialising in using recycled woollen fibres - not necessarily from old clothes, but also from waste generated within the textile and tailoring industries. It had the reputation of being hard-wearing but down-market.
Summons to give evidence to a court martial on Tuesday, be there on Monday. All the way from Belfast to Inverness flying out on some small, cramped plane with a couple of SIB sergeants, the MP's equivalent of CID.
There was nothing for me to do in Inverness when I got there. Still the SIB took me out drinking at their expense (note to self - never drink with Army sergeants again). I woke up sitting up in bed next morning not even having managed to lay down before going to sleep - or passing out as it might be unkindly called.
Car collecting me to go to court, gave evidence, had lunch in the mess sitting next to the judge (that never happened in Crumbing Road), catch flight back on small plane calling at Skye, fretting about apparent tightly timed (it wasn't) change at Glasgow.
It turned out the only reason they wanted me there the day before wasn't to discuss the case or anything, they just wanted to be hospitable. The hospitality cost me a day at work out of my last week in the job which I sorely needed as I was scrambling to write up all my pending case reports. Worse still, the regiment was being posted so if the case had been delayed it would have been a free trip to Kenya instead and probably a witness fee.
"I honestly expected that they'd just extend the whole process indefinitely until the inquiry is finished"
I think they're targeting "heat death of the Universe" as the finish of the inquiry. They may not have that many new documents to discover but padding things out with discovering previously discovered document has helped thm in the past.
One thing which I discovered looking through some of the more technical accounts was that the counters provide services for a number of customers. ASDA PoS will not simultaneously be handling sales for Tesco and Morrisons as well as their own.
A slightly more comparable situation can arise with a filling station operating a supermarket branded convenience store: a few days ago I bought petrol at a BP filling station with a Morrisons Local (or whatever they call it) convenience store attached which could handle BP customer cards but not Morrisons'.
The COTS PoS system is too limited when it's asked to stray outside supporting one business at atime. The alternative, of course, is that the PO reorganises the way it does business to avoid all that. Maybe miracles are possible.
Yes Minister is, as ever, the text book on how to prevent this. Only answer questions that are asked and the head honcho, having been kept in the dark, doesn't know what questions to ask and, if they insist on being told everything, get snowed under with everything from a list of stationery stocks upwards.
Presumably it would be up to the copyright holders listed in the declaration to do that. But as the fine for not making a declaration is only $5,000 that's pretty well a get-out-of-jail-free card. In fact, without some sort of policing to show that a declaration is due, it's an actual get-out-of-jail-free card
