hackguru's comments

There are a lot of efforts in developing models that understand causal relationships within mainstream machine learning community. Mostly to train models that don't require a lot of training examples. Deep learning usually requires a lot of data and trained models are not easily transferable to other tasks. Yet humans tend to transfer their knowledge from other tasks pretty easily to seemingly unrelated tasks. This seems to be due to our mental models surrounding causal relationships. One example of such efforts is schema networks. It is a model-based approach to RL that exhibits some of the strong generalization abilities that can be key to human-like general intelligence. https://www.vicarious.com/2017/08/07/general-game-playing-wi...

What do you mean by computers handling ambiguity? At the end of the day for a idea to become cristalized it needs to be free from ambiguity. That is the case even in human interactions. When using ambiguous language, we iterate over ideas together to make sure everybody is on the same page. If by handling ambiguity, you mean that computers can go back and forth with us to help us remove ambiguity from our thoughts then they are basically helping us think or in some sense do programming for us. That is a great future indeed! A future where actually AIs are doing the programming in long run! But with this line of thought we might as well not teach anything to our kids because one day computers will do it better. Specially if we already stablished that they can think better than us :)

There is an upper bound limit for how abstract a general purpose programming language can become. Programming languages mainly exist because of their ability to remove ambiguity. Our natural language on the other hand is very vague. Many people might read the same exact article and interpret it differently. This is natural language's great feature. This feature is why a kid, without fully formed thoughts, can learn and use a natural language. Hence I don't see a day programming languages will completely fade away. Programs are result of a careful thought process that cristalizes a concept into a process and that process is only complete when you can describe it in an unambiguous language. One may argue that natural languages are capable of being not ambiguous. A subset of a natural language can be used without ambiguity but that is just definition of a programming language. Arguing programming languages will fade away is the same as saying math one day will not be necessary because we can explain all concepts in physics or other sciences in natural language.

I am in no position to question EM. But I was hoping he would give some good explanation for spending resources on SolarCity acquisition but nothing. Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was bought other than some hand wavy explanation about inherent difficulties of two separate companies working together. It still doesn't seem like a good purchase for Tesla specially at the moment. Solar car and SolarCity seem to only have the word solar in common :) TBH I am still fuzzy how expensive purchase of SolarCity can benefit a solar car manufacturing even in long run.

Since agents need to be authenticated once with users, the replay vulnerability should not be a concern. But a malware that sits on a client and potentially can access to agent keys can definitely be used to authenticate when phone is in proximity of infected machine. But that level of vulnerability on clients is pretty serious.

I knew someone will catch that. I was a bit sloppy on that sentence :) I will have to improve it.

1- We only need secure multi-party computation algorithm if we cannot trust the server. In cases that server can be trusted with behavioral fingerprints then we can use server to to do the comparison.

2- One can assume that in some cases the server should not know about the behavioral fingerprint. For example in case that this procedure is implemented as a service, it might not be proper to send client side mouse movement and key presses to the server. Still server can be trusted as a mediator but should not know anything more than fingerprints being almost equal. You are right that behavioral finger prints like mouse movement are fuzzy. Specially since agent and browser are running on two different threads they get different time stamps for each mouse location. In this case you have to introduce some acceptance for fuzziness as you mentioned. Some statistical comparison. This is not as easy as checking equality securely (like Socialist millionaires problem) but you can in theory turn any circuit and make it secure so that the circuit will only expose fuzzy equality and nothing more about the data. See secure multi party computation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation

But your concern is valid since in practice the computation involved to do secure multi party computation in this case might be demanding for a browser. I have yet to verify that in practice. Keep in mind that our case is a bit more relaxed than general secure multi party computation problem since we have a server that can be trusted a little bit. Maybe that can help us a bit in devising a secure computation scheme. Any volunteers to work on that? :)

So two companies with great potential. One (Solar City) has a problem convincing investors and is exposed to wide fluctuations and the other (Tesla) is pretty good at managing expectation and enthusiasm in the market. So I guess the idea here is to limit exposure in one of them by absorbing it in another. Might work but goes counter intuitive to the idea that I always thought was the most important in Musk companies: Focus. Focus on delivering one main value. Hope this works out.

What does this mean for PowerShell?

True. I am cautious to say this, but if one of these over valued unicorns like Uber dies then I think the psychological effect would be similar to a bubble burst. It would tight up the capital flow to a great extent even for solid companies

Is he gonna run out of charge between any two stations?

True. I don't think this process encourages anybody to commit physical crime. But physical crime has higher barrier to entry than cyber crime and turning what currently is a cyber crime to a physical crime would stop many criminals from committing the crime. Most hackers who are sitting far away from victims won't risk stealing someone's laptop and phone to break into their accounts. Either way that is just a side benefit if any. The real benefit is more secure, yet easier authentication than long, hard-to-remember, and less safe password authentication.

It would be even better if the money would go to exposer through bit coins or something that is not easily traceable. There is probably tax complications that needs to be sorted out.