dbelchamber

Amen. I would also say that Forbes is another excellent example of the ludicrous level of calls and hostile features.

I have a feeling that Basic Income will be a societal upgrade and people will still work, but I don't think it's going to solve wealth disparity. My gut says that it will actually make disparity more obvious, just people at the bottom won't be struggling as hard. Anyways, this is mere speculation. What do I know?

I love gray too!

BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!

I'm very excited about this. When I watch this new breed of AI play, I find it really interesting what they value and greatly enjoy speculating as to why in human terms.

Classically unreasonable political demand, 10/10

Eesh. If all of this is accurate, it is problematic indeed. I wonder how many of these homicides would cease to occur if drugs were made legal in Brazil (I wonder about this worldwide). I've never understood why it's difficult for people to understand the awful incentive structures that making drugs illegal puts into motion.

I suppose the essence of being an entrepreneur is being the one to make decisions no one else has made. It seems to be helpful to be data informed with your decisions, but I suppose the moral of this article is that advice can only help with general rules of thumb. In order to solve specific problems that haven't been solved before, you have to carve your own path with your own decisions.

Thank you for your comment. I too have that pet peeve, and I'm glad you voiced it. Just to give you some personal context, I'm a dual citizen between the UK and America, so I've had an interesting relationship to various understandings of the "default accent". I've been told that my pronunciations and word choices are too American or too British in different contexts. I think the important thing to realize is that there is a barrier to understanding that needs to be overcome, and I'm not saying that one side is more responsible than the other for overcoming that barrier. All I was trying to give voice to was my genuine inner process for better or worse. I'm not saying it's right, just that I've gotten by in this way for the reasons stated.

I would say that it's a nebulous and organic process that settles into particular pronunciations. One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the British accent is actually considerably more divergent from the one that was common to America and England in 1600 (I can't seem to find the source right now, but will edit if/when I do). I'm not saying that it's right, just that it happens and that there are valid reasons for it happening.

I'm just honestly representing my subconscious reaction to not understanding people easily at times. Perhaps I should put more effort into it for more people. I definitely have plenty of relationships with non-native speakers. It just takes more time for me to acclimate to them, and therefore there is a greater cost to doing so.

Yes, but given the context of the article, this did not seem to be an adequate representation of the other side. There is more to it than the idea of "a single true and authentic way to speak". I would say that a better way to frame it is "an organic coalescence into normative standards for better cooperation".

I would not say that I'm fluent at Spanish, but I have and continue to put in some effort to speak it.

I don't make the decision to avoid them. I said that "I'm less inclined to deal with them". That's a very important distinction.

This is definitely useful to keep in mind, but I think one point that might not be represented adequately is the utility of a standard. I understand that there are difficulties for people speaking in a nonnative accent, but there is also actual value in being close to standard and having less accents considered standard. When many people are specializing in many things, having a standard way of speaking allows us to more quickly understand one another and skip the basics. The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non-standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being lazy.

I would say speech synthesis is governed by very clear mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

As for style transfer, that is a very specific skill of making the patterns of one style map to the patterns of another. I am not particularly well versed with art, but that process seems well defined to me.

Perhaps your issue is with my more generalized definition of "clear" and "well-defined". I meant to use these terms to distinguish between autonomous driving and being a successful human. I really don't think there is anywhere close to a consensus on the latter. To the extent that there is, then yes, AI should be able to do it.

I completely agree. Current AI is excellent (or at least super-human) at learning to do anything where the mechanics of the situation are clear and where the measurement of success is well defined. Beyond that, I'm not sure we've made any convincing strides towards anything truly general.

wow, this is a work of art

I'm really disappointed in rockpapershotgun.com's adblocker strategy. They make you click on "I'm a bad person" in order to continue without disabling adblocker. While somewhat funny, I'm firmly on the side of ending bad ad implementation. The advertising industry needs to improve (I actually like the rare good ad), as most of them are trashy. Anyways, rant aside over.

As a counterpoint, the biggest gripe of "trolling" that I have is that it prevents dialogue rather than adding to it. It's one thing to argue for say Nazi ideology in a relevant conversation with the purpose of expressing a genuine point (this would be a rare event indeed), but that is not what trolls are doing. Instead, they are invading a conversation with ad hominem attacks as well as distracting and attention-seeking behaviors.

Preventing trolling does not inherently involve silencing points of view. All it should be doing is removing unhelpful, unsolicited, and off topic nonsense. Even the most evil views that I can think of should not be censored, under the condition that they are actually being discussed with the interest of discourse, for that truly is what "dialogue" is. But again, in that event it isn't really "trolling".