And also the Haredim Jewish sects are seeing strong growth.
Both the Amish and the Haredim reject a lot of modernity and are quite conservative as well look to keep traditional families and gender roles. Probably not a coincidence that there are the groups still seeing strong growth.
Is there any computer-based clustering/analysis you did of the individuals? Sometimes this can reveal a typology of the underlying root causes. Maybe you could see which cluster of symptoms predict others, thus suggesting root causes....
I am not sure what you mean by "computer-based." We definitely have done various types of analyses: Support vector machines, latent profile analysis, multivariate distance matrix regression, and others. The field as a whole is VERY in-tune with ML, clustering, etc methods...because we need it. Results are somewhat mixed, but this is due to lots of noise in the data, limited samples, and overall copmplexity etc.
> I think ADHD and it's subtypes is probably a description of something like 8 different actual neurological causes, which all show up as 'ADHD'.
This is the case with I believe probably the majority of psychological illnesses that have not yet been nailed to a clear biological cause.
Schizophrenia definitely has a bunch of sub-types. As does anxiety. As does whatever is sociopathy/psychopathy. ADHD included.
Over time, individual types of each of these mental illnesses will be carved out from the general type and tied to specific biological causes, thus making the vague categories even smaller.
Empires all do end and when they do they often fracture because of a built up of social discontent, but they are predicted to be ending 1000x more often than they end. Eventually someone calls it correctly though, and generally you only know who in hindsight.
It's like predicting someone's death: undoubtedly one day that person will die, it's just quite hard to predict it accurately. As devil in a certain book jested, "Yes, the man is mortal, but that's half the trouble; it's that he sometimes is abruptly mortal, that's the trick!"
The core problem is that for someone knowledgeable in the field, everything becomes straightforward, but the further away you are from the field, the more novel it becomes -- this is true across the board. Even the great accomplishments where people win Nobel prizes, often it can be argued that it was going to happen anyhow because it was the next step in scientific progress given the context.
Thus defining "non-obviousness" is super hard to do -- because it is all context dependent and humans are like a million monkeys inventing everything that can possibly be invented in aggregate.
It is not true that anyone knowledgeable in a field finds everything in that field straightforward. For example, Schoof's algorithm for counting points on elliptic curves was so non-obvious to relevant experts that he struggled to get his paper through peer review. Diffie also struggled to get his ideas about public-key cryptography published because experts in relevant fields did not understand how such an idea could even make sense. Another example is Gentry's original FHE construction, which was not at all obvious even to experts in lattice theory or any other relevant field of cryptography or math. It pains me to say this, but Bitcoin is also an example; check out the response on the cryptography mailing list, where several prominent experts in the field were confused by the concept of electronic payments that do not require any bank to issue and redeem the money.
Those are just what I know off the top of my head from my own field. While there is plenty of incremental research in any field and plenty of situations where a motivated expert would have arrived at the same basic concept, it is not outlandishly uncommon for a truly novel, non-obvious idea to be presented. The problem for patent examiners is that they are not experts and the pace of software innovation leaves them baffled by the applications they are examining; there are also too few patent examiners to handle the volume of applications that are submitted.
One way to address the problem is to just abolish software patents entirely. Software was never meant to be patentable, at least not if you recognize software as a form of applied math (happy to argue this one all day long) and accept the idea that math is not (or should not be) patentable.
Controlling volume to a set of speakers via a remote is something we’ve been doing in the analog world for decades. So a general patent on volume control across speakers should be invalidated.
It only becomes novel due to the details of the tech. But even then you could implement the solution in various ways and I can’t imagine every potential method was patented.
So, while I agree the non-obvious can be hard to define. But with patents like this I don’t think we’ve found the right balance.
At a previous company, we had to _add code_ to our software in order to avoid violating a patent. Yes, if we just let our system do what it could, that violated a patent. We had to check for a certain condition, and disallow the generic system from doing a specific thing, in order to not get in trouble. Sorry, but that's insane.
I dealt with a manufacturing patent where you had to align certain parts off-center, because lining them up was patented. Of course it didn't really matter how you did it. Hence a subsequent patent was eventually actually awarded to someone else to manufacture them off-center. Which was far worse if you think about it. The first patent claimed a unique point. The next one claimed the entire three-dimensional volume of possible alternatives--minus that unique point.
The patent in questions covers using a controller device on a LAN which presents a UI to the user to raise, lower or mute/unmute volume which then raises, lowers or mutes/unmutes the volume across a set of speakers grouped together on the LAN. It does not cover a specific method of doing this. Any method accomplishes the above would be covered by the patent.
I feel like "using a UI that communicates over LAN", on it's own, isn't something that should be patentable for anything at this point. That's just basic network communication now. Now, if the device being communicated with did something interesting maybe there is a case on that end, but I'm not familiar enough to comment.
give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent and not how the patent implements the claim.
If the experts can find a way to implement the claim in a relatively short period, then the claim is obvious and should be rejected.
Of course it is possible that a more specific claim is not obvisous. For example, if there are specific performance requirements. If the initial claims are obvisious, the inventor can try again with more narrow claims.
Another requirement that is sorely needed is that an expert in the field can actually understand the patent in a reasonable period of time.
that's not really going to work though.. there have been (and must still be) tons of "obvious" solutions to well-known problems..
So if you could simply "give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent" and have them actually come up with something.. Well, then it'd be trivial to simply rewrite existing unsolved problems in "claim of method to solve problem" and they'd magically be able to solve it?
The problem is that obvious solutions become obvious only when they arrive, and not before.
Even framing a problem so that it can be solved is an example of this.. There are lots of problems that only appear after their solution. Before the solution, they weren't problems, but simply "how things are". Like, right now, we've not solved death, so for most people, it's not really a problem, it's just how things are.. If we solve death, future people will look back at us in disbelief: (You try to tell me people just DIED? and the entire world didn't unite to fix that? what the fuck was wrong with them? guess they got what they deserved..)
I'm just saying, that if your claims have obvious solutions, then the community has no need for your patent. The patent has to solve something that is not obvious.
For the community, it is only worth granting a patent if the community gets something back in return. And that is, solving a problem we don't know how to solve. Obviously, that can be with efficiency parameters. If the simple solution is 50% efficient and the patent claims 90%. That may be worth the patent. And everybody else can keep using the 50% efficient solution.
In your example, if you now come up with a patent that solves death, then no expert will be able to find a solution in reasonable period.
If you can then show a working version that solves death, even if it is completely obvious in retrospect, it is worth a patent.
I like this idea, but the pro-patent argument says that some things become obvious only after you see them. Once a company starts selling a product with the new idea, everyone will figure it out, and it will become part of the set of things that are obvious to experts.
In my opinion that's not what patents are about. Patents are about how to do something. The obvious purpose is that revealing your patent advances the state of the art.
Otherwise, why would the community grant a relatively long term (about 20 years) of monopoly? It doesn't make sense to do that just for a clever business idea.
I basically agree with you. The counterargument says that some innovation simply doesn't happen for centuries, until it finally occurs to someone. You want to incentivize those kinds of innovations as well, to get people to revisit old issues. For example, the stirrup. Evident once you see it, but a big innovation, or it would have shown up centuries earlier.
A lot of things once explained seem obvious, but clearly weren't or they would have existed before.
I like to explain it as similar to wheels being circles. Of course that is obvious once you see a circle shaped wheel, but the insight to do that in the first place is the novelty element.
Similar advances are happening in every little niche industry and novelty implies non-obvious.
The problem is that things that are already well known and obvious are being granted patents because “but with software” gets tacked onto the end.
“Control a group of speakers” - not patentable
“Control a group of speakers, but with software” - patentable
Maybe there’s some really interesting way Sonos controls speakers with software that should be patentable. But “with software” is not novel on its own.
This is certainly the ideal scenario. But typically, they didn't exist before because they are incremental improvements based on things which didn't exist before and use technology which didn't exist before.
The claim that they are obvious is based on the fact that anyone who is involved in the production of those prior incremental steps can see what can be done as the next increment. People are working on producing wheels using molds and certain materials. Across town, someone starts selling a new kind of mold or material. The "inventor" applies it to the molding of wheels.
The difficulty is that it is really hard to claim something as obvious/non-obvious once you know about it. Basically can't determine if it is something that was incremental based on progress -or- if it just seems like that now that you know about it in hindsight.
Agree with your point though, and it may just be one of those impossible questions which is why the patent office struggles with how to make these decisions.
I'm having trouble thinking of examples of what you mean. It's not like people invent new branches of math to make a patent like with revolutionary ideas in physics. Do I get 6-12 months (or even more) working on the same problem and subject to the same constraints and available technologies the inventor had? A really "prophetic" idea can probably be identified as such because it's far too ahead of its time to get patented or used anyway.
But when it comes to money-making patents, I think of technological development as an optimization process where everyone has the same objectives and a pretty limited search area at each point in time (available technologies you can use, textbook knowledge you can draw on). I'd generally expect any smart and dedicated person working on the problem to find the next best next steps sooner or later (certainly far less than 20 years).
It is a hard idea to correlate since you can't unwind knowledge. I think your idea around giving a person X time to come up with solution could work if the patent office could afford that.
Maybe take a 3rd party who is unaware of the patent/novel idea and then asking them how to solve for some generalized version of the problem that a patent states it is solving and see what happens.
Similar to black boxing that companies will do with tech that may have been shared under restricted terms.
I've been in the same niche for years and can certainly tell you what I could and couldn't figure out. There's no magic in what I do, else only 23 year-old geniuses who think outside the box would be dominating all the patents. Even nobel prizes are on average awarded for work done at middle age.
Just do peer review and get experts' opinions. Don't tell them how to make it work, just tell them what it does. E.g. make the inventor provide a carefuully-worded abstract. By the way patents that claim the category of problem itself as the invention (as opposed to the specific method for solving the problem) are another big problem that needs to be eliminated. Those broad first claims are the ones shot down in challenges. For example "use a computer to processs transactions", or even "use a convolutional network to classify faces". These are not inventions; they are problems that still need to be solved, and it can be done many ways.
Anyway if you're uncertain about 6-months, how can you justify giving them 20 years of monopoly?
It's about costs, networked speakers for pro-consumers was never a thing it was just too expensive. Until it wasn't and then you obviously had to controll them together.
He has several standup specials. Among recurring themes:
- References to his role in Full House/AFHV (they made him wealthy)
- References to his role in Full House (having sex with a younger cast member)
- References to his role in Full House (cheap shots at the other adult cast members)
- Generally high-shock-value sexual references/innuendo
- Various self deprecating jokes mainly of a sexual deviancy nature
- A not-surprising-in-hindsight large amount of musical bits
- A general not so subtle hint that this, too, is all a facade and that while you may be appalled or interested in this other side of him it’s just as insincere
And if all of that makes it sound banal: it is, and it isn’t. It’s very predictable humor you could imagine coming from a “how to reboot squeaky clean image as surprisingly dirty and dark”, and it’s also very well delivered and more thoughtful than you might expect.
I’ll give an example, with apologies to Dang as it’s pretty raunchy.
I remember some comedian woman saying that Bob Saget’s favorite birthday present for women were ultra slim tampons. He’d say “put this prominently in your bathroom that way men will think you’re really tight.”
I’m… probably more uptight than most people about respectful humor. And while I wouldn’t say this is totally in the clear, and I don’t have full recall of the joke, it’s certainly one that could be delivered with respect. And at least to my mind it defaults to “punching up”, in this case the butt of the joke being foolish men who would draw that conclusion in the first place.
It’s been several years since I’ve watched any of his comedy specials, but even when he got really … over the top … I think there was usually at least some hint or signal that he was generally making fun of the grotesque in his own mind and not fully excusing it.
It would never occur to me to consider whether a joke from a standup comic is or isn't sufficiently respectful of a group, is or isn't accepting of something unacceptable.
That's like questioning whether the comedian really did have that conversation with his neighbor at the bus stop he mentioned in the set-up before the punchline.
A standup joke doesn't need to be respectful, it only needs to be funny.
My attitude is if it’s funny I laugh at it, whether offensive or not. However I recognize in this day and age there is a certain sort that will be offended. I caveat for no other reason than to acknowledge that I am aware of all the downvotes I am going to get…and don’t care.
So brave! But seriously, how can you post so confidently that funny is somehow objective and that you get it when others don’t? That in itself is a joke, so we’ll-played, I guess?
Of course humor is objective. Do you think honestly it isn’t? Pretty sure there is no “universal humor truth” out there.
Also not sure what’s brave about posting about laughing about something possibly controversial when you don’t care about the consequences. I don’t care if I am down or up voted on anything I post. My self worth is not tied to any social scoring system.
Probably neither... they were both for the audience. The 'America's Dad' thing came mostly from his stint on the show Full House in the 80's and 90's. However, his standup could get hilariously filthy and was as anti-'America's Dad' as one could imagine. I doubt it was a drug thing, he just had two different audiences he played to and did it well.
In fairness, this wasn't his joke or even meant to be funny... it's kind of a comedian test of sorts re: delivery. But you wanted to know how filthy he could get...
I've heard the Aristocrats joke before (mainly Gilbert Gottfried's version), but I was wondering if Saget had any routines where he would come off as more, for lack of better phrasing, "impassionatley and authentically vulgar". Reciting a hand-me-down joke just doesn't strike me as that. I'm of the opinion that even Tom Hanks has had an opportunity to recite the Aristocrats in front of an audience and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a tape of that somewhere in the world.
Fair enough... most haven't. Pretty much any of his standup/specials (i.e. the stuff he didn't do for network TV) will have a fair amount. For example, I started doing a YouTube search on 'bob sagat' and it offered to complete it as 'bob sagat stand up nasty' so I figured 'sure' and this was near the top: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjGm5DNDadU and of course he didn't need to club you over the head with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLazfBlUkfk
Intel's strategy is often to hire the best talent of their competitors. Case in point Jim Kelly from AMD who did a stint at Intel after the success of Zen.
This guy was not the head of the M1 processor initiative from my readings, but he was involved in it.
I think I got this from the HN mythology, but it was a story about a consultant who was just one in a long string of consultants that all said the same thing.
Intel strikes me as a company that basically needs a chorus of folks to sing to them, "change your tune, you know what to dooooo"
Whatever beef Jim had, they should probably just fix that. Intel is just a really fancy machine shop with a small design firm on the side that has the blue prints for something that lots of people want. Until they don't.
Open your fabs, open your engineering services and you will be the largest force in semiconductors. Hell, even if Intel's designs were 100% open source, they could still smoke.
That is actually Apple's strategy. They always set up sites around their competitors, San Diego (QCOM), Orlando (AMD), Austin (lots), Portland (Intel).
Intel on the other hand really couldn't care less about talent. Their Portland site has been around for decades and Intel has knowingly underpaid the engineers there the entire time, because it was a one-company town ever since Tektronix became irrelevant. Intel is all about hiring C and D-hitters at discount rates so managers can build an empire of loyal slaves with no options.
Most compilers are one of the prime cases of inefficient architecture, the worse the larger the project gets. There is an awful lot of time lost waiting on I/O for hundreds to thousands of files (even assuming that there is enough RAM for the OS to cache all the files and metadata, every file that is read has at least three syscall context switches for open/read/close, dito for intermediate writes) and for process creation and destruction.
What I would find really, really interesting: a "single-process" compiler that has a global in-RAM cache for all source contents and intermediate outputs and can avoid the overhead of child processes... basically a model like Webpack or Parcel that has an inotify watcher and is constantly running. The JS world had no other choice with NodeJS/npm all but forcing the tooling to adapt to a lot of incredibly small source files, it's time for the "classic" world to adapt.
Would it actually have more resources that say Apple? I think if Apple can not do it, I am unsure if anyone else could. All supposedly secure smart phones are not, but they are at least obscure.
I think that one should probably buy an Apple (at least they control everything rather than the cobbled together android clones) and disable basically everything except exactly what is needed. At least that reduces the surface area. And keep personal stuff on a separate phone.
Apple can do it (create a security focused phone), it just isn't anywhere near what they want to do. The instant security (or privacy for that matter) gets in the way of profit for Apple they will back away.
Apple is actually not in the business of selling the data of their users. They will also risk aggravating large players in favor of improved privacy. A recent example: App Tracking Transparency [1] which makes tracking an opt-in feature to be requested from the user. To no one's surprise users are happily declining when made this offer. Companies like Facebook aren't too happy about it. [2]
Privacy and security are related, but distinct. Apple has been pushing privacy, but we're talking about security here. Typically the tradeoffs around increasing security have to do with user experience, something Apple typically does not like to compromise on.
Well, keeping things private certainly rests on the security of devices and protocols. That being said, Apple investing heavily in making security unobtrusive isn't in itself a sign of weak security. A lot of it is just well engineered and thus unseen. But documented in parts for everyone to see: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
If I somehow made it seem as I thought Apple sell data then that wasn't my intent (but neither does Facebook or Google sell their data).
However I do believe that Apple is only doing what you describe as a PR move. At the same time Apple fight other's advertising and tracking they are strengthening their own version of this. That users get something good out of it is strictly a side-effect. Promoting Apple because of this is in my opinion worse than promoting Facebook for their behaviour as they don't try to sell it as "protecting their users" as far as I know. Using an Apple phone is likely better than one Facebook had its hands on but the thinking and ethics behind is worse in an Apple product as they are successfully being extremely disingenuous towards their users about protecting their privacy.
Or maybe it's because they're doing their best to make every iPhone the security-focused phone, while not doing anything that would anger the FBI enough to try to pass legislation. When you are that big of a company, the things you can get away with are much more restricted than a small company.
iOS seems the worst solution, like you are forced to used Apple web engine so a bug or zero day in that engine will own all users. Apple would need to give the users the ability to uninstall preinstalled stuff and replaced them with safer or better alternatives.
The parent post is saying that many of these "secure phones" are, on paper, secure - but that's because companies like the NSO Group don't give them much attention. If they did become the focus of attention, they'd probably burst from a thousand leaks.
Both the Amish and the Haredim reject a lot of modernity and are quite conservative as well look to keep traditional families and gender roles. Probably not a coincidence that there are the groups still seeing strong growth.