For me its a bit of a balancing act... You produce a project which is successful means you need to devote time to it. But to devote time to it you need to provide support, updates, etc. If your projects doesn't earn money or you are forced to work on something else it becomes difficult and then you whish people will not use it. Most troublesome are student projects who pm you.
Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brains.
Biology is essentially simple chemical reactions on steroids. I.e. you have assumed there is a qualitative distinction between biological brains and artificial neural nets that cannot be overcome by scaling up. However (A) AI models are many, varied and new variants are being explored all the time, and (B) there are systems where new new dynamics appear at larger scales, thus producing a qualitatively different system based on the same underlying rules, e.g. physics -> chemistry -> biology -> human brains -> social networks.
Related, I used to jokingly explain mean-square-error approximation like this: there is this geometrical theorem, that you can drive a line through any three points on a plane, as long as the line is thick enough. So mean-square-error approximation is basically minimizing the thickness of that line :).
I just tried using Lazarus, I found it quite fun to use. I understand where the author is coming for when it comes to RAD. It is extremely easy to use. It feels like C# but compiles down to native code that runs on all platforms.
That's it? That tells me the same thing I saw when I attended a Vicarious researcher's talk at MIT CSAIL: they're basically reinventing stuff the Bayesian generative modelers in cognitive science have been doing for years, throwing some video-game playing at it, and calling it AI instead of cognitive science.
Give me $50mil and I could do a good deal more than that, just because I bother to look stuff up!
I lived in China for many years. Honestly, the government is very clever about how they censor. They don't do things so obviously and they allow a little bit of criticism. there is no hard and fast law as to how they censor. While I lived their they were constantly hopping between VPNs. Some of their censorship is political, some is a also protectionist. Had China not blocked google, Baidu would probably have been dead by now.
To start with this article is published in English. They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it so its no big deal. I have seen articles in Shanghai daily which give minor criticism to the government. But overall they always try to project a good sentiment about the country. Furthermore often what is published in English print written by Chinese is not the same as what is written in Chinese print. Language is ultimately their greatest tool for censorship.
Also, 90% of the population remains unaffected by their blockages since they can't understand what the rest of the internet is saying. If you were to try to access youku (Chinese website akin to youtube) within china you would find that the streaming speeds put youtube to shame. So for the average person why would they be interested in youtube?
As long as the government provides people with basic infrastructure and safety people are willing to put up with some amount of censorship.
That is interesting. Yeah it can be a wise move to allow limited criticism, since (1) I think they realize some criticism can be beneficial to fix faults of the government, and (2) it helps provide the appearance that the people are in control of the government. There is also strategic ambiguity in not having to obey a "hard and fast law as to how they censor", since the government can censor in what it deems the most pragmatic manner.
"They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it". But in my experience in China at summer programs in universities, I found that almost all university students (at least in Beijing & Shanghai) can read English. I suppose they will of course prefer to read Hànzì.
The more extreme example of the benefit of allowing criticism was Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign, where the government actively encouraged criticism, only to abruptly change course, and arrest many of those who took the opportunity.
In other words: Encourage a little bit of criticism, and you will be able to observe those who join in - even if they don't go too far - and be able to obtain a handy register of people to pay extra close attention to.
But the common person cannot. Also you are looking at the best universities of the country in Beijing and Shanghai. And as you stated, they still will prefer to communicate in their own tongue.
Of course. And I'm aware that the best universities are in Beijing and Shanghai. But still that is a sizable population of intelligent English-reading Chinese. I'm sure the government would be concerned about them being exposed to ideological influences in english media.
The government doesn't fear intelligent people, who are by definition smart enough not to risk their career or physical safety to openly criticize. This "sizable population of intelligent English-reading Chinese" are primarily focused on exploiting Party connections to help them build wealth, and then expatriate the money beyond the government's reach.
Nobody is talking about a revolution, that would be suicide. The intelligentsia are far more concerned with using government to their advantage, which naturally responds very well to money exchanged for favors (like how baidu got rid of Google).
It's poor people that government worries about. Because when poor people rise up, that's bad news for anyone in power who hasn't yet fled the country. And if most poor people don't read English, well then there is not much harm in allowing some printed criticism of the Party, as long as it's in English.
A classic move from Japan and South Korea's economic rise was a closed home market, but with home companies forced to export.
This created a safe pool where new local companies could grow before they were able to face international competition. These companies could incubate and then burst onto the international stage.
I wonder if this is an electronic version of, e.g. what Korea does with its automobile industry using taxes...
The gap is that Chinese online companies don't seem to be exporting much as yet. In the case of chat at least, I think it is actually being held back by GFW because you need a chinese phone line to register.
On the contrary. No other language is perfect, so if you can only think of perfect you would keep using PHP; it's only if you recognise the idea that a language can be better while still being imperfect that you can switch to a better language.
The EVM has been formalized in theorem provers [1], so they're already taking that threat seriously. One threat also mentioned in the above thread that is often overlooked are full abstraction failures, ie. exploitable mismatches between high level language constructs and the machine code to which it gets compiled.
I tried to understand what is going on in this paper. Am I right to say that it seems like they are looking at parallelizing subtasks within each domain and at each time taking advantage of unordered tasks if possible?
Correct. One of the goals of this work was to expose and exploit the abundant parallelism within large atomic tasks. However, the tasks within a domain can be ordered or unordered. Our system will exploit any kind of parallelism that is available.
