kiterunner2346's comments

Capitalism can't do that without redistribution in the form of severe taxation of the wealthy. That's why we need to revive estate taxes and inheritance taxes: in their absence, great dynasties of incredible wealth are formed and then sit idle for decades or even centuries, protecting themselves in trust fund fortresses to no particular end than their own existence.

Could someone write a tl;dr for this article so I can understand his point(s)?

"...Pulls Out..."?!

An improper metaphor since it was the performers who got screwed, not Pornhub.

But, in the end, Pornhub _will_ be screwed (no pun intended).

tfandango says> "If I see something and call that number, my identity will be protected. That is the way my company would prefer I handle ethical issues and I will keep my job. If I gather up evidence and release it to the press, I will lose my job."

Do NOT believe that!

The reality is probably quite different. Many organizations (both private and civil) make such promises but, in truth, the complaint phone line/box/e-mail is a direct line to either higher-ups in the company or to someone in another agency who will, very quickly, pass identifying information to higher-ups. The whistleblower will be tracked down mercilessly and driven out always. Those for whom the whistle blows will, not infrequently, be rewarded.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in many public and private endeavors and, in every case, so-called whistleblower phone lines, complaint boards or monitoring companies have proven to be ineffectual and/or downright deadly to the career of anyone who contacts them. They are usually honeytraps for those poor individuals who believe their complaints will be fairly judged.

With reasonable care the press can be relied upon to vent complaints to the public w/o identifying the complainant.

I've taken Amazon's warehouse guided tours several times The surprise was that there is NO surprise: the entire process is merely the application of current technologies in warehousing and distribution, with humans in the few niches where machines are not quite "there" yet. in the places where humans are involved, there's just enough workspace so that, say, once Amazon develops a proper "binning" robot, the human can be fired and a machine rolled in to replace him/her.

Place was nicely put together though: all the screws and bolts tight, racks and tracks level and properly aligned, sensors everywhere on the production line ready to alert of any problem. So kudos to the guys and gals who put it together and lined it up! Looks like the U.S. Army put it together (well, actually, if the Army did it, it would be use better parts and be more sturdily constructed).

As for what it does, nothing there of interest to high tech.

Never heard of "Mavis Discount Tire"! I Google'd "Mavis Discount Tire vs Discount Tire" to find that the latter is suing the former for trademark violations:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/discount-tire-lawsuit-c...

Wheel retailer Discount Tire claims a rebrand by Mavis Tire Supply LLC—labeling its stores Mavis Discount Tire—violates its trademark rights.

The company’s Dec. 26 lawsuit says Mavis started renaming stores after buying multiple chains located in the South and Midwest, where Discount Tire does business. Mavis intends to confuse customers and profit from goodwill built up in the Discount Tire trademark over decades, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Georgia.

Mavis previously used Mavis Discount Tire branding only in northeastern states with no competing Discount Tire stores, according to The Renialt-Thomas Corp., Discount Tire’s corporate name.

Looks like an interesting case!

No, b/c there is no "long-term" for ML/AI. Look at what brought the current ML explosion: Moore's law held just long enough to make ML work reasonably well w/in the human attention span. Nobody anticipated this. It overrode other interests and now dominates AI (for the moment).

The same thing could happen again and another technology could sweep ML/AI aside. ML/AI itself is not a predictable "career path" like chemical, electrical/petroleum, or mechanical engineering are. ML/AI is more like the Wild West: maybe you're a wildcatter who has a new idea, thinks he can find oil and strike it rich.

If you want a predictable career path that covers most of the same subject area then choose statistics, mathematics or data science.

Yeah, but presumably it's cheaper, so Gresham's Law of Pizza demands that the better-looking pizza become obsolete.

It all began with Astronomer John Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole" nearly 50 years ago, and who famously said that "black holes have no hair" because of their simplicity.

"Hair" is used as a colloquial term among physicists as a stand-in for any other measure needed to describe a black hole, apart from the traditional three-quantity model: mass, angular momentum (how fast they spin) and electrical charge.

Consider this hard fact:

"Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S...."

from the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/jason-riley-the-other-ferguso...

One must conclude that, a priori, blacks are more dangerous that whites. Ergo, one would be wise to take fewer risks when engaging blacks in any way. This isn't necessarily racism, but merely common sense and one should not be surprised to find that, as the sinapticas article states(concerning policing):

"In prior studies, participants were significantly more likely to shoot an unarmed black individual than a white one."

Finally, to the above and other questions such as

"Do black Americans commit more crime?"

visit the url:

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer...

The answer is "Yes."

Yeah, sure! And how about the dental decay vaccines that have been promised for, oh, about 40 year now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine

This gel will come out as soon as either

a) Hell freezes over or

b) dentists get a monopoly on the gel.

"Medical progress" is an oxymoron.

I call it "doing the same thing over and over again, hoping someday you get lucky." I think there's a commonly-used expression for that behavior.

Hinton got lucky: something he had nothing to do with changed, making him look like a stoic hero.

A winning strategy or just a lazy path?

Indeed, he wasn't competing. In fact, he wasn't moving; he kept doing what he had always been doing until, luckily, something, that he had nothing to do with, changed and allowed NN methods to work better. So I view him as essentially standing still, frozen in time, like a clock stuck at 6 o'clock. And, just like that clock, he would inevitably be correct (at least twice a day). He had nothing to do with the tools (higher memory & CPU speeds) that made his methods work, he just kept doing the same thing over and over until, one day, by accident, something important changed: his lab bought newer, faster computers.

He's not exactly Louis Pasteur is what I'm saying!

If you're carrying it, its spying on you.

I can only agree. But I thought the reason this worked was that it assured I engaged the assistance of the brightest person in the room.

Aside: I wish I were joking.

From the article:

“This is the second Silent Spring. Neonics are like a new DDT, except they are a thousand times more toxic to bees than DDT was,” Klein says in an interview."

Rachel Carson's conclusions in "Silent Spring" were never proven to be correct - nonetheless DDT was restricted by EPA (by bureaucratic mandate rather than by reference to convincing scientific proof).

DDT should be brought back in the USA.