apag

So the question is now whether they also come back this time as they did before, or whether this time it’s for good.

It’s now usable without JS once again. It was not long ago that repositories stopped being viewable without JS enabled, but they are now again.

I hadn’t tried interacting in Issues without JS enabled in years, but I just tried to out of curiosity and successfully replied to an issue that way.

I must admit to finding myself quietly impressed that any place would be capable of reversing itself on a decision like that.

More of a self-flagellation than an apology, frankly… it was actively uncomfortable to read, unlike even his initial angry mail. I have yet to respond to him because I didn’t know what to say after that.

It was not a good point.

AlphaGo can’t decide that it’s bored and go skydiving. Humans aren’t merely capable of playing Go. And when they do it, they can also pace around the table, and drink something, all at the same time, on a ridiculously low energy budget. Or they can decide never to learn Go in the first place but to master an equally difficult other discipline. They continuously decide what out of all of this to do at any given moment.

AlphaGo was built by humans, for a purpose selected by humans, out of algorithms designed by humans. It is not a more advanced species. It’s not even a general intelligence.

Your own original point was much better than the one made in response.

Let’s not forget that aside from being vastly more energy efficient as a Go player, Lee Sedol is additionally capable of taking on a virtually unlimited list of other, equally machine-challenging tasks – while AlphaGo can only do one thing. In fact, Lee can lift himself off the chair to a standing position, pace around the table, lift a glass to his mouth, keep it there while emptying some of it, and think about his next move – all at the same time. (And on the same energy budget.) And far beyond all that, he decides whether to do these things – or something else instead.

I admit my first thought on fairness did go in the same direction of limiting energy budgets. But after reflecting on it just long enough to realise the above, I am finding myself surprisingly uninterested. It now seems to me that nothing particularly insightful would be revealed: limiting energy budget is no less arbitrary than limiting time unless the artificial opponent is expected to be capable of a range of things comparable to that expectable of an average human. Or if expectations are much lower, the artificial opponent would need to contend with drastically tighter limits to approach “fairness” – though at this time it would be guesswork how much tighter they ought to be. Either way, it is glaringly obvious that no computer would come within miles of competing.

So ultimately the fact that Go has been “broken” (in a particular sense) at all is far more interesting to me than whether the machine is competitive with the human in any more general sense. “It’s not” as the universal answer is boring.

And to digress a bit from there: From that perspective, this was ultimately a very human achievement. It was humans who chose Go as a problem to attack and it was them who picked MCTS and deep learning as the way to go. (Uh, no pun intended.) That’s not just reassuring. It’s also a framing we should keep in mind as computers become more entangled with the physical world and more autonomous.

It’s simply not the full experience without sitting through it running on while the choir swells.

Why would you need VNC?

You only need a browser. On the machine on which you thought you were going to run the VNC client, you open the browser and go to beets’s web UI. Then you pick some music to play, and beets streams it to the browser, which plays it on that machine.

If you actually want the Pi itself to be playing music, then you probably want not the beets web plugin but the BPD plugin, which emulates an MPD server. You can use any MPD client you want to control it – CLI on the Pi, one of the GUI apps over the network, whatever.

No matter what, VNC doesn’t enter the picture.

Hey, cool! Nice to get an attribution – is it OK if I add the citation to the post? Anything else you remember about it?

And here is how you get a web page you can open to view the whole thing in a one sitting:

  perl -e'print "<style>img{width:2048px;height:2048px}</style><pre>"; print /X$/ ? "\n" : "<img src=$_.png>" for @ARGV' {{13..1}n,{1..19}s}{{33..1}w,{1..48}e,X} > index.html

Warning: gigantic page, may crash your browser. (Not as bad as it might seem, since many tiles are missing.)

Thanks for sharing! I was just going to do that myself, glad that now I don’t have to.

Then again reading said book made me believe they’re fairly easy to write well. You need to keep in mind what a quantifier really does (“this will gobble up the whole string and then yield bits until the pattern matches”), but in the end I find it not fundamentally any more taxing than a having in my head a rough idea of the behaviour of a few nested loops or recursions.

You do understand that “due to a bug in Rakudo” means that this is a limitation of the implementation rather than the language, and that it will be fixed in due time – right?

OK, Mr. PickyPants, I went and fixed my usage. Happy now? :-)

(Thanks for the nudge.)

Good comment. I just want to react to the last sentence.

I use `git commit -a` plenty and without compunction. There are many times where a tweak or very simple feature doesn’t involve any exploration, and in those cases I rarely need the elaborate staging dance to make a sensible commit. I review the patch and find there is no need to break it down… why go through the index in that case?

The index is just a tool, and so is `-a`. Judge their use, not the tools themselves.

(Of course, sometimes I realise belatedly that a simple feature commit is not as straightforward as it seemed. Well, it would be belated if we weren’t talking about git. Rebasing (interactively, in particular) saves the day in that case. Once again: git goes out of its way to get out of mine. This is really the central point.)

That’s true, most of the time it doesn’t really matter.

But it’s like properly formatting and indenting your source. Any one particular instance of sloppiness is irrelevant, but in the aggregate, the care you put into it really makes a difference in the feel of your works.

Yes, that’s what I meant. I tried to keep the terminology simple (there were several other places where I avoided jargon) because I consider the article’s target audience to be people who aren’t already deeply familiar with the subject.

Yes!! Exactly. Thank you for putting in words something that was too hazy in my mind to even think of expressing it.

Would you mind giving your name if I add this to the article as a quote?

For posterity (hopefully this link will last longer than the front page), here’s what was on it:

http://static.thepiratebay.org/doodles/cartoonish.gif

You can’t get out of it. You can only prepare: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-p...

Surprised that no one has posted it, so I submitted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490767

Exactly how would it do that, pray tell?

There is zero contradiction between that statement and materialism.