...I seem to have picked a hell of a time to return to the US...

Thanks guys. Also the right-wingers are going nuts trying to cast everything as "antifas" fault, but it's not, the Nazis started most of the violence. They perpetrated most of it, too. Richard Spencer claimed they were "holding their ground", when I had Nazi groups charge my area and start swinging at anarchists. The first real violence of the day was started when those Southern Nationalist *******s charged through a crowd with riot shields. The Nazis also started with homemade smoke bombs, almost setting fire to some tents. Antifa and other anarchists were starting violence too but **** all of this "we're the true victims here" ****.

I mean, pretty much all of the right wing groups showed up with sticks and shields to fight. "Peaceful".

Also, some of the Nazis (warning: NSFL) were going around attacking people after the event, I can't find evidence any of the opposite violence except for one person. Plus my own experience of a group of punks harassing a woman.

If I learned anything at the rally, I've learned that these far right groups are further detached from reality than I had ever previously realized.

As supporting evidence, they're going full Sandy Hook now:



Arguments like this are all over right-wing snakepits online.

Also the tweens over at the_donald deleted their thread supporting the event and are somehow claiming antifa dress up as nazis and do nazi salutes to discredit Trump events. lol

White supremacists aren't exactly known for taking responsibility for their choices.

Isn't shirking responsibility what beta cuck leftist males do?

Or is whining like a baby while the police break up your demonstration for beta cuck leftist males? I'm not sure.

A very fair point of view from a Christian conservative.



I skimmed over the theology but his head seems to be screwed on right and he is even-handed in pointing out the problems of both political parties without equivocating or summarily dismissing.

And interestingly enough, the comments section actually consists of paragraphs rather than tweets and jabs. Pretty rare nowadays.

I think many people do find it offensive that Trump won't directly criticize white nationalism. I agree very much with that sentiment.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/judge-denies-bail-for-man-accused-of-ramming-car-into-charlottesville-protesters/2017/08/14/2177a028-80fd-11e7-ab27-1a21a8e006ab_story.html?utm_term=.77505502be73&xcv&hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_fields-513pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory



You can't make this stuff up.

I have to eat my words, because apparently he did today:

Holy **** this feels like something straight out of a green text story. I will be looking for the 4chan thread on this tonight.

.

Doesn't matter. So long as the white supremacist media outlets had time to get out the meme that Trump was Their Guy, his delay will already have been interpreted as playing to that base. He's only running with his tail between his legs now because his approval rating is dropping precipitously.

I expect he's at least somewhat aware of what he's doing when refuses to condemn those groups. But you generally don't lose betting on the Trump administration's incompetence when it comes to stuff like this.

This inspired me to go look it up. The 34% approval rating is abysmal, but I'm even more shocked by the 61% disapproval. I figured there'd be more than 5% of responses to be ambivalent or indifferent.

To put it in perspective, 64% is the highest disapproval rating recorded for any president (Bush 43).

Actually, on October 10 2008, GWB had a disapproval rating of 71% according to Gallup.

Of course that was after two terms / wars....

[experiencing technical difficulties]
[did the threads get a sprinkle of the UNHOLY MERGE?]

Maybe it's just things on my end but this whole silly debacle at Google has been the only Google-related thing I've heard recently. I mean, it's been awhile for me to hear Google doing anything as of late when, years before, I would be made aware of a lot. I'm out of the loop?

that's what they want you to think

they're working on AI research hard
i heard from a guy who heard from a guy they cordoned off two floors of Google London
top top secret

with a cherry on top

As of late? The zombie corporation in question that used to incubate cool new weekend projects and other gadgets such Gmail and Maps (respectively), has recently utterly desecrated Google News, as a part of their ongoing project to kill off the desktop version of the site in favor of a mobile Facebook lookalike feed of clickbate. There are alternatives, though.

Waymo v. Uber, too

Google reorganized into a holding company called Alphabet. Most of their new product development efforts were spun out into Alphabet subsidiaries to take them off of Google's books.

Google's self-driving car efforts were spun out into a company called Waymo. Somewhere in the move they lost most of their best people to various other startups, including Otto/Uber, Cruise, Apple, Thrun's two (?) efforts, even some conventional car companies. The story is that Google/Waymo's autonomous car experts used their Google compensation to bootstrap a bunch of new startups. Either way, Google/Waymo has lost a lot of big names, they're burning bridges, and analysts think their technology is now lagging far behind their competitors.

Google's AI efforts are actually Deepmind AI efforts are actually deep learning efforts. Deepmind was a relatively recent acquisition, and wasn't fully integrated into Google before being spun off again, so it's a stretch to call them Google. It's best not to think of this stuff as AI, but more like building a really big statistical model that's too complicated to understand. They're doing interesting work, and Deepmind is well connected to the best researchers in the area, but they aren't much ahead of their competition. Facebook has been using similar technology for translation and facial recognition for a while.

Those are the only ones worth discussing.

Google Proper has been doing a few small things here and there, for sure. They've tried to reinvent e-mail via terrible UX. They've also reinvented RSS in a way that makes it really easy for Google to steal your content, but is broadly worse for everybody else. I guess they've made a bunch of Vive apps. Plus I'm sure they've been updating and maintaining their core product(s) although I'm not sure how you'd be able to tell.

Google lost a LOT of good early hires to Facebook when it ascended. Like, for example, Paul Buchheit, who made Gmail, one of Google's most important products. Facebook wasn't just the new hotness, but Google was grossly underpaying engineers back then. IMO they never recovered from it and IMO they never will. Between that, and the holding company restructuring, I don't think you should expect great things anymore.

You forgot the part about how they are trying to re-invent the closed web via non-standard Chrome extensions.

Well, I mean, they did hire a lot of Microsoft guys.

General AI is the future.
It's an arms race.

I think Elon Musk is correct in saying that AI research should be pro-actively regulated (as opposed to putting laws into place after an incident, because by then, it might be too late).

In many ways, AI intelligence would be alien and foreign to us.

Singularity might be an answer, but it would be at least a couple hundred of years until that, I think.
Good way of space travel though,
upload yourself into a computer onto a spaceship
maybe with a set of robot bodies
and then ship yourself to Alpha Centuari
in "power down" mode
arrive
power up
and boom
we colonized space

or sentient machine-human computer hybrids have
at any rate

Well I guess that explains Google's "solution" to the longstanding bug that you cannot access files via USB mount just because some system process failed to update the index, is to reboot the phone (the old MS band-aid). And if you don't have a top of the line model (I have a Nexus 5X, which is actually quite recent), this takes about 5 minutes.



https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/46315/not-all-files-are-visible-over-mtp

I ended up running sshd on the phone, and a reverse tether program on the host, and then mounting it on the host via sshfs.

If you're looking for a sentient machine that is programmed to produce incrementally smarter and more efficient versions of itself, look in a mirror. There's no evidence that a manufactured computer would be better at consciousness than a natural human, or be able to improve itself faster than a human could improve, or that its upper limits would be any different than our upper limits. Fear of general AI is a lot of agonizing about nothing.

The kind of AI that needs to be proactively regulated are the statistical models used by courts to determine sentencing, or the models police use to decide what neighborhoods to patrol. The ones that have been proven to be deliberately racist. At least you can easily define that kind of AI, versus the more nebulous "general" kinds.

general artificial stupidity, on the other hand....

On the plus side, if Deepmind algorithms do rise up against us, all you'll have to do is paint some dots on your face and the murderbots won't be able to recognize you as a human.

I actually think that raises an interesting reason why superintelligence isn't a huge threat. The real reason humans and other biological organisms are so well adapted to their environment is because our sensory systems are so closely coupled with it.

You're not going to take over the planet with a rack of servers. You might be able to crash the stock market.

Every time some ******* like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk talks about the threat of AI, I feel like it's just fearmongering by attention whores who love to see people are writing articles about them.

I went to a conference once about one of those crime prediction models. One of the presenters made jokes about how they used a model of pack animal violence to model gangs in inner city LA, and was joking/making comparisons between the gangs and animals. It was the only time anyone actually laughed at a presenter but I was slightly uncomfortable because it didn't seem that funny to dehumanize people that way.

Not much of a point to that story, except how those sorts of researchers think about the human beings involved.

The real threat of AI is some corporation is going to make an all-in-one AI model to prescribe drugs but will think it's too expensive to hire a doctor to verify the results, and an AI is going to prescribe 500mg of Valium to an old lady and nobody will catch it.

Neither of them have computer science or ML backgrounds. Stephen Hawking has never written software, and Elon Musk might as well never have[sup]1[/sup]. I don't know if I'd call them fearmongering attention whores, but I would call them unqualified, and far too optimistic about what is possible with current approaches. That probably explains why Elon Musk thinks it is safe to force Tesla's immature and unproven self-driving tech onto the market, which, unlike superintelligent general AI, is an actual dangerous and irresponsible use of AI that should be regulated.

Google's image classifier originally thought all black people were gorillas. The MSM (Google PR) framed it as ~the limits of deep learning~ but anybody who's ****ed around with Torch or Tensorflow knows it's because racist Googlers didn't think to train it on black people.


(1) From Elon Musk's biography, written by Ashlee Vance:

I guess we should be happy that it didn't originally classify all women as porn.

I thought the bungle with the image classifier may have been plain heedless.