Yeah, you're responding to the wrong person there. I didn't say anything about moderation. I just asked people to stop spamming off-topic replies on first posts.

People also suck at interpreting probabilities. If you say "10% chance of rain on X day", and then it rains, people say you're a liar and you got the prediction wrong. No, they predicted a 10% possibility that it would rain, that's entirely different to saying it definitely won't rain at all.

People are so bad at probabilities that you could probably tell people that there's a 45% chance of something happening, and a large percentage of people will only plan for the 55% outcome then get angry when the 45% one does.

There have been incremental advances in weather forecasting for a LONG time. The joke back in the 1960s was that it wasn't accurate even 1-2 days ahead. Now people get upset that it's not predicting the weather correctly weeks out.

forgot to link source:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.digitaltrends.com%2F...

I'll also point out some other fallbacks rather than love:
- a computer will never write a sonnet
- a computer will never paint a painting

Well, done, and done. But of course, once computers do write sonnets, the goal-posts shift that it needs to be a sonnet that you can't tell was written by a machine. But ... that's getting illogical. If two men, Jim and Barry both write sonnets, and Barry cannot write a sonnet that could pass for one of Jim's that in no way means Barry wasn't any good at writing sonnets.

I'll also point out that critics keep shifting the goal posts.

So, a lot of the criticism is of the form "a computer will never do " and there's always going to be a thing that they haven't done yet, so the anti-AI crowd end up sounding like creationists with their god-of-the-gaps arguments. I've had conversations where they end up saying "well ... a computer will never fall in love!" as the fall back. Ok, so a machine can beat 99% of people at every task except falling in love. Seems like a useful machine.

The term incremental is wrong here. "incremental: relating to or denoting an increase or addition, especially one of a series on a fixed scale."

The growth of anything in computing is by nature exponential instead. Part of the problem of early AI predictions was that they *did* take an incremental view of the problem but also vastly underestimated the amount of processing power of the brain, while also underestimating the complexity of various domains. It's largely limited by the hardware. A desktop computer is going to be around the order of magnitude of the processing power of the brain of an ant, which has 250,000 processing units, but they're very slow.

They have in fact made advances in this domain about as fast as they could have, given the physical constraints of the hardware needing to exist before you can do the experiments.

Look, grow up and stop bringing teenage internet drama into an unrelated topic by spamming a reply on the first post. We all know that's what you're doing.

That's not what the linked quote appears to say. You cut his quote out of context to imply it means the opposite of what he said. I don't know this WindBourne guy but doing that implies you are the liar and not him. The way you edited that implies WindBourne was making the claim, but he was in fact debunking that claim.

"That same attitude prevails on /.. Look at the number of ppl that scream about AGW (rightly), but then defends China's right to continue adding loads of new coal plants, OR will lie and claim that China is NOT doing so. Or will claim that CHina's wind/solar is outdoing all other nations, while ignoring the fact that / capita, china is way behind and that their coal continues to jump much higher than AE combined."

He is right on that, China lags the West when you look at installed wind power *per capita*, and they are #1 for coal consumption, while building astronomical amounts of new coal plants. Sources:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcleantechnica.com%2F2012...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldometers.info%2F...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fch...

All that's factual so far. Where there could be a lie is that he said that apologists for China's contributions to AGW vs America's "prevail" on slashdot, but there have been a least a few of those, so whether they "prevail" is a matter of opinion, not fact.

"Carmack has pioneered or popularized the use of many techniques in computer graphics, including "adaptive tile refresh" for Commander Keen, ray casting for Hovertank 3-D, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3-D, binary space partitioning which Doom became the first game to use, surface caching which he invented for Quake, Carmack's Reverse (formally known as z-fail stencil shadows) which he devised for Doom 3, and MegaTexture technology, first used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars."

"early in the development of Doom, Carmack realized that the 3D renderer he had written for the game slowed to a crawl when trying to render certain levels. This was unacceptable, because Doom was supposed to be action-packed and frenetic. So Carmack, realizing the problem with his renderer was fundamental enough that he would need to find a better rendering algorithm, starting reading research papers. He eventually implemented a technique called “binary space partitioning,” never before used in a video game, that dramatically sped up the Doom engine."

Sure, once you know how it's done, it's quite easy. But ... open a physics textbook and get to the section about deriving e=mc^2, and that is in fact *even easier*. Einstein came to his realization purely from Maxwell's equations. So, by the same logic Einstein is just a dummy and anyone *could* have derived special relativity just from Maxwell's Equations. In Carmack's case the ability to read a bunch of research papers, work out what the important parts were then work out how the hell you implement that in the c language for a home computer was the remarkable part. We only have the benefit of hindsight in that we have an off-the-shelf explanation of how binary space partitions in games work, the same as when deriving e=mc^2 you have the hindsight benefit of knowing what you're meant to derive.

Yeah, there have been no advances in machine learning in the last 80 years.

I mean the only way to really describe QAnon as it now exists is as a revival of the 1980s satanic panic / day care hysteria but somehow combined with a Millennialist end times prophecy that Trump is the second coming of Christ. Unhinged apocalyptic religious nutters who love guns. It's not going to be a good mix if Trump loses, these people literally believe they're fighting the forces of Satan and that Trump is the chosen one.

Qanons believe Hillary Clinton literally eats children and leads a satanic cannibalistic "cabal" who have secret underground children farms in tunnels under Central Park, and that's not even the craziest belief. The "great awakening" in their belief is the point at which Trump is basically revealed to be the actual messiah and creates heaven on Earth and Hillary and all her Democrat colleagues get arrested and set to Guantanamo Bay. It's well beyond normal kooky politics.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2FUS%2Fwire...

I'll point out, viruses already do this. It's a viable treatment.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Fr...
> Physicians and scientists have found that injecting tumors with influenza vaccines, including some FDA-approved seasonal flu shots, turns cold tumors to hot, a discovery that could lead to an immunotherapy to treat cancer.

But the idea that you can or should engineer a cold virus to infect everyone on purpose instead of using targeted treatments is dangerous and stupid, almost certainly wouldn't work, and everything that could go wrong with doing that almost certainly would. The science isn't there to engineer a virus the way you say it is. What are you going to use? A coronavirus presumably. The reason flu viruses work for lung cancer is that flu gets into your lungs. Having a disease that's virulent enough to get in there and do the job, and spread to everyone unstoppably, is by definition going to be a dangerous virus. There's no conspiracy to stop this, the idea just wouldn't work or even be a good idea if you could get it to work: once it's out, it's mutating and swapping RNA or DNA with other viruses and you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

"once the anti-cancer common cold was out in the wild"

Moronic on every level.