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Comment: Re:Outside of Valve I don't think many developers. (Score 1) 67

by BitwizeGHC (#47436833) Attached to: What Happens When Gaming Auteurs Try To Go It Alone?


Well, there is the Naughty Dog way: stick with a proven formula and polish the SHIT out of the implementation.

Comment: Sometimes the reasons aren't technical (Score 1) 241

by davidwr (#47432499) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Unattended Maintenance Windows?

Maybe back when the maintenance window was created it was created for a valid technical reason, BUT technology moved on and management didn't.

In other words, in some environments, the technical people won't have a sympathetic ear if they ask to cancel the off-hours maintenance window simply because of local politics or the local management, BUT if the maintenance gets botched and services are still down or under-performing through normal business hours, nobody outside of IT will notice.

Comment: Prepare for failure (Score 1) 241

by davidwr (#47432193) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Unattended Maintenance Windows?

One way to prepare for failure is to have someone there who can at least recognize the failure and wake someone up in time to fix it.

Another way to prepare for failure is to have a system that is redundant enough that a part could go down and it wouldn't be more than a minor annoyance to users or management.

There are other ways to prepare for failure, but these are two common ones.

Comment: Re: AI is always "right around the corner". (Score 1) 553

I don't know how to determine this, quantitatively or otherwise. It's an interesting question once machine translation gets better, but for now I consider it obvious that something like Google translation does not know what it's doing. Having access to and having translated a large existing courpus of text is obviously not enough, as Google certainly has analyzed more text than a human translator does, and still is wrong whenever there is the slightest possibility of ambiguity (i.e., all the time, in practice).

Anyway, TFA was not about machine translation, but AI. A human translator who translates a text knows that he is translating a text. I am not worried that a computer will, by 2045.


The machine has no fucking clue about what it is translating.

Neither do you, it's just an illusion caused by a simple computer called the brain. Everything you think you know about yourself is an illusion. You do not make decisions, you do not have free will, your are nothing special. You are a biochemical computer that is 100% deterministic. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's true.

This is wholly beside the point. Even if I am deterministic, any human translator understands the text he is translating to a quite large degree, or else nobody will bother with him. The best translation machines understand exactly 0%

Comment: Re: AI is always "right around the corner". (Score 2) 553

Welcome to the http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Q: if there was a human dumb savant who could translate instantly between multiple languages, though without understanding how he did it (think Rainman), would you say he was not intelligent? Why? What is intelligence? We are inconsistent - we praise humans as intelligent when they can perform some complex algorithm well (chess), and yet as soon as a computer beats a human, or all humans, we denigrate the task as "not intelligence". Often the reason is "just an algorithm", but as a neuroscientist knows, that is a poor excuse - it's algorithms all the way down.

Yeah, we have no idea what constitutes intelligence either. Got any other old news?

Anyway, my post was not about "without understanding how he did it" but knowing what the translator is doing, how a sense of self relates to this, the history of the text in question and its context, the context oft he content itself (without which is appears impossible to translate even remotely correctly, as Google Translators mindless efforts seem to be showing), the context of the media, and many other aspects or translation process and translation material.

Comment: Re: AI is always "right around the corner". (Score 5, Insightful) 553

The machine has no fucking clue about what it is translating. Not the media, not the content, not even what to and from which languages it is translating (other than a variable somewhere, which is not "knowing". None whatsoever. Until it does, it has nothing to do with AI in the sense of TAFA. (The alarmist fucking article)

Comment: Re:the ultimate mesh network (Score 1) 474

I have relatives in the Netherlands and the houses over there are built much more sturdily than the usual stick-built home in the US which doesn't have much structure to block wi-fi signals. However even in my thin-walled house the signal from my router barely reaches to the end of my back garden, so I expect anyone who would want to use it would have to stand on the street directly in front of my house.
