.. many would strongly advise against avoiding those emotions, and possibly getting help / ideas / guidance on how best to defuse their affect on you.
There's a significant difference between understanding the political horrors, or knowing that cancer is a problem - versus being terrified of thinking about these realities.
Well, yeah, I hear you. But for the past 5 years I have progressed from panic attacks and benzodiazepine dependance... to mostly "nothing" by just "avoiding" the anxiety. I sleep all night, I am much more happy with my work, etc. All of this, just because of taking the "right" decisions, which are mostly avoiding stress, like switching jobs, improving my physical fitness, allowing myself to be lazy etc.
Yeah, it may backfire in the future, but I am not going back there, if I am allowed to choose.
Thanks for start.me. I just registered. I forgot these kind of portals still exist. I used to have netvibes.com but for some reason I stopped using it. I will give another try with Start.me.
We've needed a solution like this for almost a decade. Thank you, thank you. Love the minimalist vibe to it, gets the job done, transparent + reduction in complexity for user = safety.
Would you ever consider creating a mesh network manager (to replace horrors like Hamachi)? It could allow people to generate the keys conveniently/safely and connect servers/clients in a distributed, non-centralized manner easily.
meh. // as a programmer for 37 years, and a person heavily familiar with technology -- meh.
That is 80s level crap right here, he didn't seem to know people yet. Fair enough, but still.
The future is nothing like this man thinks, plus he doesn't understand the power of organic tech (the brain) - or the idea that any intelligence is hampered not by speed but by the density and depth of the "graph" it has to explore to provide context for any given answer.
Just my 2c -- I'm sure I will get hammered for it sometime in the future.
The hammering may come sooner than you realize. Typical objects to many of the AI predictions are based on a mindset that sees computers are Turing Machines and focus on single threaded computational power.
As I'm sure you know, AlphaGo/Alpha0 replaced much of the "graphs" for Go/Chess already, and as we talk, an open source clone (Lc0) is doing quite well in TCEC:
I would not be surprised if this is the last year a classical engine wins that tournament.
And as tensor-based computing (an other non-Turing Machiene substrates) continue to mature, I expect more and more problems to be solved by carefully designed special purpose substrate/software combination, enabling solutions to problems that are practically unsolvable with traditional algorithms running on Turing Machines.
Tensor-based computing, as you put it, is linear algebra, and it can be simulated on a turing machine quite easily, but this has really no relevance in terms of practical use. Maybe you are thinking of von-Neumann architectures? But there is no escaping the fact that tensorflow and similar algorithms have nothing special about them that requres a different computational paradigm...
You are correct in that a Turing machine, given enough time, can perform all computation required by Tensorflow. So, if you don't care about time an cost, you are correct that a new paradigm is not required.
But, since a Tensorflow network does not _require_ all the functionality of a Turing Machine, it _allows_ you to limit you to more specialized computational models. And in doing so, you can run your system several orders of magnitude faster. (And the TPU type of processors are still at an early stage, expect at least a few more innovations to widen this gap further)
This comes with a few changes:
- A lot of algorithms (for instance those using recursion) are hard to transfer to a "tensor machine", making some skills obsolete.
- Many/most problems are solved using machine learning techniques, that tend to favor more stats/data science/maths than many pure programmers have.
- Simultaneously, the new approaches are almost equally alien to old school statisticians, as the problem definitions (in particular the kinds of patterns to look for) tend to be quite different.
- Also, the way to approach problems, estimate what problems can/cannot be solved or how complex they are, are quite different. (Requiring changed intuition.)
- New development is to a large extent fueled by changes in hardware (CPU->GPU->TPU->?), and I think problem solutions will become more and more about seeing possibilities across both hardware and software, instead of treating these mostly separatly.
In sum, I think the change in emphasis, skills, methodology, etc is enough to be thought of as a paradigm shift.
As a developer of 36+ years, I have 'some' authority to say this. You made some good points but stop! I think the other commenters here have patiently covered the salient points. You work in an industry that is evolving.
Great! We're all old here it seems (I'm 42), a few of us joined back in the 90s...
It started as a great human experiment, such fun. It became co-opted by commercial enterprise. The two largest gateways into the experience are now Google and Facebook. Really, what did we expect would happen? Probably best to take it back now.
Why? The internet isn't for us, it shouldn't be a quirky clique only for the technorati, it should to be for everyone.
"Normal" using the internet for mainstream, banal and commercial content that doesn't appeal to us is more or less the culmination of the dream. The world has been liberated (at least in part) and connected.
Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for humanity as a whole as we mourn the loss of our own cultural relevance in the greater scheme.
It's a lot more than the ability to interact faster.
Prior to the internet, the paradigms for mass communication were the telephone and paper mail. Either slow, or expensive, over long distances. Mass media was entirely centralized and corporate owned, and information meant finding physical references at a library.
Now, mass communication is nearly instantaneous and multi-paradigm (text, images, video, documents, whatever) and pretty much free, or at least no longer priced as a function of distance. My Australian in-laws Skype almost daily with my family, something which would have been, at least, prohibitively expensive before the internet, and wouldn't have involved video at all.
Mass media is dying out to web content. Instead of subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, and whatever is on television, we have literally more content than is possible to read, watch and listen to, on every conceivable topic, professional, amateur and archival. And thanks to the internet, media is no longer tied to physicality. You can watch movies without a DVD, play games without a cartridge, etc.
I would argue that the internet has been more revolutionary in terms of the way the common person accesses and harnesses information than the printing press. The mere fact that an ordinary person can publish to the web, as opposed to, say, printing out flyers or a zine or being lucky enough to write for a mass-print publication, has been transformative.
I don't really see that as a "wash." There have been some negative effects, and damage to privacy and personal liberty (as one could argue there are with any form of mass communication) but I struggle to think how the negatives would equal, much less exceed, the positives.
The tech and the reach they have would give any dictator a chubby.
Power corrupts.