When the first PC with Basic launched in the 80s many people wanted to develop for it.
When the iPhone Appstore launched, many people started to build apps in the ecosystem.
While it might be it bit too early to compare RL to those advances in technology. I personally feel there is huge potential. I might be wrong though. And I am fine with that.
RL needs a supercomputer and its code is usually too fragile - making a trivial mistake anywhere (missing a constant multiplication, swapping the order of two consecutive lines of code etc.) would likely lead to your model never converging even if you got everything else right.
The hard part of RL for the problems I've encountered in my work is that you need a simulator. Building a reliable and accurate simulator is often an immense undertaking.
In my opinion there's a wide open array of approaches from control that can help with this. Learning for Control is a new conference that looks at this very topic.
Sorta. Code is the medium of encoding a program, but it's just text. One important part about programming is it gives us a new mode to think in terms of. Another is that it gives us power over an entity (the computer) to execute things. The cool thing about Papert's LOGO was that children already knew how to think in terms of left, right, forward, etc. so they could act out their programs in real life before writing them down. This is one step forward, but not enough.
We have to stop looking at computers as machines with mice and keyboards and small screens that we conquer with code and start thinking of them as abstract entities that execute things, and then think of how best to manipulate those entities to do what we want.
"The computer is an instrument whose music is ideas" (Alan Kay) - Can you imagine what music would look like today if all we could do was write it down and hit play? Where's the emotion and playfulness in that?
An app which only requires 50-100MB released by a major software vendor in 2020. I am shocked. It's a bit short on features though. Hopefully, that's not going to break its neck.
> is that an American spent his money how he liked
Caps on campaign spending are there for reasons. A campaign
should contribute to meaningful public discourse. Nothing more.
> the American media is free enough to have reported on it
Private media can be biased. Either explicitly (lying to peoples faces), or implicitly (self-censorship on stuff related to the owner). Surprisingly, in several countries - such as Britain or Czech Republic - state-owned media are the one sticking to higher values.
> American citizens are now well-informed enough to know that some of the folks they talk to online are paid, and the American election will be based on the interactions of a free people
> Private media can be biased. Either explicitly (lying to peoples faces), or implicitly (self-censorship on stuff related to the owner). Surprisingly, in several countries - such as Britain or Czech Republic - state-owned media are the one sticking to higher values.
If you can show evidence of this, I’d be interested. I’m pretty sure that /all/ media can be biased, and is. The BBC is no different or better than Fox News. They both share the news from their perspective.
I thought so as well - up until yesterday when I tried desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Such an awful experience. Just trying to pick an available meeting room was surprisingly more difficult than on the modern web. And I can hardly see how even Microsoft could bring the web experience to desktop in the future without somehow leveraging the existing online version.
> I tried desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Such an awful experience. Just trying to pick an available meeting room was surprisingly more difficult than on the modern web.
That has nothing to do with Electron. You can totally bork an UI on the "modern web", too. There's nothing stopping the Outlook team from porting the old room picking interface to the web version.
I've only used the Outlook web app as a fallback (at $work it used to be available using 2FA, and I'd use it if I needed to check my email real quick but didn't have my laptop -- and, thus, "real" Outlook -- with me) so maybe it's an exception. But most of the time I really wish people would stop trying to bring the web experience to desktop :).
The desktop version being awful (as is just a lot of stuff MS makes) is no excuse here tho. It can be done better and there's no inherent thing to either implementation that prevents it.
Sometimes I have a "how awful would it be to do XY" moments. Usually something brutal. But it always makes me pay even more attention to not doing that very thing even accidentally because I definitely do not want to break stuff or hurt someone. Yet it makes me a bit nervous. What if I actually decided to do that? Fortunately it never happens when I'm under influence. Do I need help?
As others have said, these sound like typical intrusive thoughts.
The most common intrusive thoughts are, I believe, the "call of the void" ones (also known as "high place phenomenon"). You might be driving down the freeway and think "What if I drove into oncoming traffic?" or standing on a cliff at the end of a hike and think "What if I just walked off the ledge?" There's also some common less-morbid ones, like "What if I kissed my boss right now?" or "I just want to scream in the middle of this board meeting for no reason." Your immediate reaction should usually be to dismiss the thought as disturbing and move on with your life. If you find this dismissal to be difficult... that's when it can be worth checking out with a psychologist.
One hypothesis [0] for this phenomenon is that it is actually a post-fact reconstruction your brain is doing. Really, it's that your subconscious was uncomfortable with some imminent danger and forced you to compensate without thinking, and then you start thinking about what just happened. "Why did I suddenly step back from the ledge? Huh, must've been thinking about jumping off."
Another hypothesis I've read (which I can't find a good link to at the moment) is that it's some self-test mechanism. Your brain kind of sends a false "What if?" signal, and you should dismiss it because of the discomfort. This dismissal causes heightened awareness of the danger imminent and causes you to be more alert and thus be safer.
Again, though, these are pretty normal. That link I shared estimates that 50% of people have experienced the "call of the void". It's really only an issue if they're extraordinarily frequent (like... all the time), or if you genuinely feel tempted to act on them. Intrusive thoughts are not always indicative of suicidal ideation, but have also been linked to OCD and similar anxiety disorders (because they're a weird coping mechanism, when you think about it).
I've always had an odd pleasure at standing at the edge of cliffs. Something meditative about trying to overcome the feeling of unbalance. Think about it, you can be perfectly balanced standing on a cubic foot of rock. But if it's suspended hundreds of feet in the air, you would feel unbalanced (wind notwithstanding).
It turns out that this actually is dangerous. The feeling of imbalance is a "real" reaction your body has.
I seem to remember Sartre saying interesting things about this idea. Something about exercising your absolute freedom or something. As far as I know, it's perfectly normal.
I remember reading these are called parasitic(?) thoughts, uncontrollable and random thoughts, sometimes leading to more complex reasoning but ultimately almost on autopilot ; like the mind is just suggesting many different things at once and you just happen to notice one of those random thinking when it reaches the surface of your consciousness. I belive it also has to do with an anxious mind but I have nothing to back that up.
I think I remember reading somewhere that thinking about jumping when you are near a staircase, balcony, cliff, or something like that is pretty common, even if you don't have the least desire to commit suicide otherwise.
It's harder to believe that there is _no way to leak information_ than the opposite. There is always a side channel, right? Timing is the most trivial one.
When every instruction takes the same amount of time (no speculative execution or cache sharing), then no, there is no timing attack. There isn't any reason to support the claim that all CPUs are fundamentally vulnerable to these types of attacks.
