gliboc

What paranoia are you talking about ? Weird to hear that because it's the safest city I've been to...

It is hilarious to jump that fast to a Godwin point while trying to instill the idea that the person you're adressing is the morally dubious one.

Maybe you could do some research about the totalitarian mindset, and learn about yourself.

Thank you: this conversation was beginning to feel surreal, between the "let's pull the plug on these frenchies!" and the "how dare a sovereign state wants to legiferate on the activities of an American company on its territory"...

I do enjoy the irony of some Americans blaming big data companies when the president of their choice does not get elected, all the while advocating for less power to French news agencies (e.g. death by asphyxiation from Google news, without any recourse).

Or maybe Netflix could say "no this is a service we are providing to our users" and then the big "Hollywood exec" would be like "ok maybe we will not sit on the million dollars we get from our agreement" and that would be it.

You are missing the point, which is that if you can blindly follow the type hints of the compiler and still get a non-stupid function when you're joking around like the author is, then in real-life coding situations the type hints will be all the more relevant and reliable.

By the way, this is literally the most common foldr implementation in functional languages, so I have no idea why you would want to do a code review of it, or talk about performances in such a trivial setting, or pretend that you're confused by it so much that you have to refer to a library...

You're going full circle here. He's not the one advocating for "modern evidence-based research and training", so it's not in his standards. And I'm not blaming him. Not everything is measurable, or at least measurable in ways that would enable researchers to extract meaningful answers or techniques. You said it yourself, productivity is a fuzzy end-goal.

If you do not believe it is possible to empirically derive a way to interview properly, then rationalism is your best choice, i.e. Intuition/Deduction. And contrary to common belief, rationalism is not a prison. It's just a decision process, in which you're perfectly allowed to question yourself using available empiric data.

FYI

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

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

Do you not mind that your point isn't reflected in the paper you linked?

Yes, and it is well known that Tesla's self-driving program reproduces Elon Musk's reckless driving habits... /s

I'm just intervening to point out that what you're saying is not what the paper you linked implies. Its title is "Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases", and the general conclusion you could derive from it is that AI programs reflect the stereotypes ... of the data they are trained with. This is why they use the right word: stereotype, instead of the charged word you used: prejudice.

It is an interesting metric, thank you for pointing it out. Until now I kept in mind the amount of miles between accidents, but surely both should be considered.

However, I think this metric could be irrelevant in the case of a home/work commute. The 11,000 miles average appears to have been obtained basically by randomly driving Waymo cars on Californian roads. But a usual commute is much less than 11,000 miles, and if your self-driving can do it by itself once then probably it can do it twice. As the article puts it:

"The value of the data is limited, however, as the figures don’t factor in the complexity of environments in which vehicles are tested–dense urban settings, versus low-speed suburbs or less complex highway driving–nor do they show conditions including weather, light or speed."

Nevertheless, you seem to have missed my point : I was arguing that coming up with a specific use-case example that may (or may not, actually) go wrong is an argument that goes both ways.

I'm returning your argument. Imagine your are driving your car on the highway, but you suddenly have a heart attack and become unable to remain conscious. Do you: (a) Die? (b) Die?

Manned vehicles are not coming anytime soon. They are a whole slew of problems etc. -- you got my point.

I think focusing too much on pesky details is very much a fallacy in this case - you do not want an "AI" to react like a human in all situations, you only want it to drive in a way that is conservative enough not to endanger people too much. And we clearly aren't that far from this goal right now.

This does not deserve a sensationalist depiction. Everyone in space industry, astronomy and even the public now thanks to this terrible movie Gravity knows about the Kessler effect.

Some thoughts:

- Putting 12000 big freezers (900 pounds at most) in orbit is never going to "crowd" the place; imagine these objects on Earth, then the claim that on a much higher radius sphere these could be seen at any point seems ridiculous. (I am not speaking about speed or dangerosity, which even up the numbers a bit, or powerful light-emitting projects)

- In that sense, the video displayed is annoyingly misleading.

- The danger of the Kessler effect is a long term one, and as such it seems purely economic to me. Increasing the number of space debris will gradually increase the probability of collisions, and raise the costs of space industry, in an upwards trend that may at some point represent a real financial burden. This is the only question: at which point does it become economically interesting to tackle this problem, and are we not underestimating the future costs at this point ?

- My take is not yet, and SpaceX will do fine managing their 12000 space fridges.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/nov/15/space-j...

Damn bisons destroying our fine tracks and bringing Indians with them; let's wipe out their species!

What the fuck ? You might as well call Musk a murderer. What a crippling bias you have there.

Cpdddkm

The original proposal, which is not by Caplan, tries to optimize time spent reading, which is crucial as a researcher.

> And why would anyone need criteria for that? What kind of person would need to justify to themselves or others that they prefer to study topology instead of, say, financial mathematics?

We need criteria to assess the value to papers, because generally the whole assumed point of writing a paper is to add value.

> Caplan apparently needs some criterion to be able to be dismissive about someone else's work or discipline rather than pursuing his own scientific goals and interests. Yes, I find that kind of anti-intellectual, or at least small-minded.

Ad hominem much. Also, Caplan doesn't say that, and you are talking about the original proposal. You don't seem to have read the article further than the title and the premise, though interestingly you seem able to judge the author itself and convict him with bad thinking. This very much contradicts your own previous piece of advice

> 1. Never dismiss a book or paper quickly because you believe you've found a mistake. Read them until the end and take the authors seriously!

which, to me, seem rather like virtue signaling than a real advice; all the more when you don't apply it thoroughly in reality.

They took advantage of the lithium-ion battery newly improved performances in their first Roadster as early as 2008. Before that, they spent their first years researching how to arrange clusters of batteries in a viable way, which is probably what lead to their remaining advantage in autonomy. At SpaceX, key inventions include soldering sheets of metal together instead of using rivets, and other stuff that made their building process much cheaper than competitors. This is surely what parent meant.

They used to buy lithium-ion cells directly from Panasonic, and now they operate together at the Gigafactory.

Overall I don't think these could qualify as fundamental breakthroughs, but it is surely an important work, and what are fundamental breakthroughs anyway? I'd venture so far as to say that here the breakthrough is in the result: electric cars are coming, whether it's theirs or their competitors.

Can you start your own product and compete against these ?

Also, technically, Twitter has 336 million active users per month [1], Snapchat has 200 million daily active users so we can easily double that amount for monthly usage [2], while LinkedIn claims 550 million users, but the monthly visits are about 100 millions [3]. Whereas Facebook is indeed 2.2 billion monthly active users [4].

All of these three huge players combined still only add up to less than a billion, notwithstanding people who are counted thrice by using each platform. I'm surprised how huge the gap remains.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

[3] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-a-few...

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

I had read [1] to [4] (maybe [5]-[6] too, but I don't remember) when they were posted, and I did think at the time that BlaBlaCar was a bad thing. But these are only blog rants, and I shortly changed my mind after that. I perfectly remember the (IMO) shitty UIs all carpooling websites had at the time, and I do remember people being doubtful about it in general. I was too. Now, there's nothing less common than carpooling, and you have to admit it serves ecology well. This is one of the things those blog posts couldn't or didn't see, four years ago.

[7] is a collection of problems people encountered. I had read a few of these long time ago, and re-read them now : these seem to be situations any service linking people together would encounter, and I don't see how any other website could avoid those entirely.

[8] I can't read; [9] is quite general.

> I've been doing carpooling for years and had no issues with cash payment or direct contact with other users, but suddenly blablacar marketed these as undesireable and risky and pretended there was a need to move to less freedom for more security by making them the unavoidable middleman and upfront payment, obviously the need was actually on their side and was about putting them in position to maximize profit.

You are personnalizing BlaBlaCar as a sneaky fox whispering into people's ears, playing on their fears and need for security. BlaBlaCar's position was the result of people's acceptance of their services in free will. You cannot change that. Also, it is very clear in some of your links that BlaBlaCar targeted the conductors (this "critical" mass) with economical incentives in order to bring the market to the next level, which, again, succeeded like nothing had before. I'm not sure destroyed is really what would describe their rise if you take a broader point of view.

> I'm not saying anything about bad practice (good or bad is a relative notion), I'm saying that blablacar destroyed the social component of carpooling to turn it into an economic one.

You are appealing to relativism, and then clearly implying that social and economic components are mutually exclusive, and I'd go as far as to say you also implied which one is evil and which one isn't. I just wanted you to notice that.

Also, it's not because something isn't free that you have to be an ass about it and that it's not social; and the inverse is also true. That's not something very common in France, but you can actually charge people and, at the same time, give them a good social experience.

> That blablacar put artificial barrier preventing people who need carpooling the most (people who cannot afford a smartphone or a credit card) from having access to it.

There are no people who need carpooling the most. Everyone needs to travel around for cheap money. It kinda feels like virtue signaling from your part to imply that you think about the poorest users, as if the person talking to you wasn't.

Also, this is quite untrue. On Leboncoin you will find older or used smarpthones from 10 euros, to 100 if you want fancy ones, while the cheapest phone plans, including internet, start at 2 or 3 euros a month. This extends worldwide with 3 billion smarpthone users in the world [1]. The magic of capitalism...

Technically speaking, to counter BlaBlaCar's existing monopoly on carpooling users, you'd have to create an open-sourced meta-platform for carpooling where people can register, and choose to use either BlaBlaCar as a middleman (that's what they do best), or not, or any other company or system that has been built to do just that. Over time, you would acquire an open database of carpooling users, which would serve for the greater good. This, and only this, improves free choice and resources efficiency, without the abuse that might come from a centralized platform such as BlaBlaCar. In my opinion, destroying or hating the business that built this carpooling community (I'm sure you did your best, but realistically it didn't exist before) doesn't. I also don't think you should go so far as to despise the CEO specifically: it seems far-stretched to me, mixing your feelings with a rational situation. And I don't think it brings you any good.

Anyway, if you're ready to do the open-source meta-carpooling part, I'm interested.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartph...

I disagree with the thought that the Vienna circle had anything to do with the course of math and science. They were mostly philosophers, with fewer scientists if you look closely, and their contribution was to philosophy, not science.

Also: they had no direct link with Einstein's work (he conducted his research decades before they even existed), he only attended some of their meetings. I'm also pretty sure Von Neumann had nothing to do with them, same for Boltzmann (who was dead).

I don't know, but probably. Sometimes you had your information for shady reasons, and it would be almost impossible to recreate it. It is a bit what's happened with Facebook if you agree that the public lacked a sense of data-privacy until then, and got abused because of that.

I guess that's what GDPR is about too. We used to discard the value of digital data, mostly I guess because it could be generated and exchanged at the speed of light. When people realized they could make money out of it, giants sitting on huge databases of personal data suddenly became the norm. And they don't share unless you pay them (if it is even in their business model).

> Is it a monopoly if there's nothing preventing you from starting your own competing product collecting the same data?

First, remember Facebook has more than two billion active users. I don't think you can realistically compete against that.

Anyway, this is a thin line argument. In some countries, I've been told, Facebook acts almost like a hub for the internet. I guess you cannot either compete against the pipes themselves.

I think Monopoly regulations are not about punishing evil corporations. They exist because such situations restrain innovation (including from companies having the monopoly) and generally disrupt free market by having one player able to do price-fixing. Honestly, I think Facebook is being hit hard by that first part by totally failing to appeal to a younger audience while becoming the dreamland of advertising.

> I have to point out that blablacar is not about solidarity, ecology or social relationships, to the contrary actually, it's about being a vampire draining money from solidarity and ecology and market domination.

So you just hate it because it's a company and it's making money. Right ?

> I mean carpooling was about solidarity and ecology, then blablacar seized the market and turned it into "no mobile phone, no credit card, no access to carpooling", "give us money first".

BlaBlaCar single-handedly created the huge carpooling market that now does exist in France for example. They didn't seize the market, people gave it to them. There are still other carpooling websites which you can use, and carpooling panels in events are still a common thing.

Up-front payment, not directly giving out people's phone number : you pretend this is bad practice, but this is exactly the security that was needed to bring the masses to carpooling, and as a matter of fact it did.

You seem to dislike that people would be ok in a win-win situation, where they both get paid for their expenses, and are happy to chat with other people while doing a small move for the planet. This is what's happening.

> I hate how blablacar turned something that was about helping each other and bringing people together into a capitalist profit making venture aiming for world market domination.

This is truly misguided. The opposite equivalent to my parent, but now with an anti-capitalist idealistic view of the world. Do you not see that? People are not into this ideological warfare of yours. The "world market domination" ... of carpooling? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?

Please find a mindset where you are able to leave BlaBlaCar be. Seriously, these are people too, and they are providing a great service. And I'm worried people, just like you do, are too prone to ranting on companies for all the bad reasons. The very reason you're using the excessive word hate, to me, seems to prove you're personalizing the entity and are a bit out of the rational realm in your claims.

BlaBlaCar is about carpooling, it is not a Uber ripoff, but you'd know that if you had travelled once to Europe. It is about different values - solidarity, ecology, social relationships - than just underpaying the guy-next-door to do anything you're willing to pay for with your smartphone.

Otherwise the only person that seems to be "foaming a the mouth" is you, in this ridiculous Murica rant.

Do I need to remind you that your country is just starting an economic war on the rest of the world with illegal customs taxes ? Also, enjoy getting scammed by your own ISPs now that net neutrality effectively got cancelled on you.

You don't realize how little Europeans care about your precious American tech companies, and more about values such as not being the data points of international megacorps with shady business practices, or low-end programmers ready to milk people of all their data just to install a phone game.

And I forgot geolocation but all of them have it anyway.

Likes, interests, social relationships. Mostly every social data that is not provided by either pictures, internet history or contact list (which is about all Google and Apple have).

This is a list of your phrases in this comment that I find, in my opinion, condescending.

> And time will tell who was right.

> You see, when you make any argument

> You might also note that this is not a scientific paper, but an opinion. Yes, nothing more than an opinion.

> And yet this opinion appears to shared by quite a few people, and makes a bunch of other people feel insecure. Perhaps there is something to it? We will see.

> So far you have not provided such an argument

I immediately identified this same tone in your paper. In your argumentation, you quite agressively hinted hat people which don't share your views are not very intelligent. You also have a tendency to present your sayings as prophetic, which appeared multiple times both in the paper and in this comment.

These observations put me in alarm towards your arguments, which I found mostly weak, sometimes used in bad faith. I flagged as such the Twitter argument, analysing the frequency of A. Ng's tweets, and denouncing its "outrageous claims", with an example where the AI score is overall only 0.025 less accurate than a practician.

I also thought that you used a different (your own) definition of scaling than most, and used it to make an argument, which was therefore unconvincing (but parent said that already).

Overall, to me, this was not a very pleasant read, and I dislike the fact that you attack the hype on machine learning by enjoying the polarization that comes with anti-hype articles such as yours. I also don't think that making people feel insecure is such a great indicator that what you're saying is relevant or prophetic.

I hope this helps you prophecies https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kagan/AS1138/Lectures/Go... ;)

I think you are wrong about this. Contrary to a normal conversation, specific vocabulary used on the internet can be instantly looked up. This allows for diving more into the topics if they interest you.

"Developpers are assholes - even blind ones."

Since when do you need to pay just to download a PDF ? Just remember there's peer to peer, and that the web is not a big black box where you can only deal with giant companies and their websites - there's freedom in it too.

Also: I think your attitude is quite symptomatic of a certain laziness of the research community, which has helped these counterproductive monopolies to rise and strive. Get angry, for once, because this is getting ridiculous.