God help us all if our central bank starts taking cues from the Bank of Japan or the ECB and their zombie economies.
Our inability to suffer short-term consequences for long-term prosperity is a real issue that we as a country need to figure out how to solve. (Can you solve for human nature?) The fed shouldn't have made cuts in 2019 at the height of the market, we should have let failing banks fail, we need to start spending responsibly if we want to remain a reserve currency, and we need to learn that forest fires clear out the undergrowth for new growth.
I think a good start would be if average people were confident that they would take part in the long-term prosperity. Right now, that doesn't seem like such a good bet.
Yes, but God has been helping us all already and it has been going on for decades, through QE and interest rates and bailouts, and a lot of top economists seem to be set on milking this as long as they can and keeping the cow on life support and drugs for a very very long time. And why shouldn't they? Nobody knows how long we can keep the cow alive, there is no real precedent. It can go belly up tomorrow or in 50 years. It works really well right up until the point where it doesn't at all anymore.
You can solve for human nature. 3200 years ago we were all in a Prisoners Dilemma stuck at backstab backstab (literally killing each other). And then Moses came down from Mt Sinai and said Thou Shalt Not Kill, and lo, the solution to the dilemma was coordinated by shared principles. I think the solution to today-era social problems will probably look something like that.
While this may not be perfect composition, this is a surreal (and almost sad) moment in my life to hear music that is passable created by a computer under it's own volition. I work at a company that works with a lot of machine learning so I generally understand its limitations and haven't ever been an alarmist. That being said, I generally always thought of it being applied to automate work. For some reason I had always considered that which we normally attribute to human creativity to be off-limits. Sure now it's not great, but in 10 years will it be able to compose better music than Chopin? In 10 years, will music created by a computer surprise and delight me more than music composed by humans?
Fear not, my friend, because the execution is only a part of why music and art as a whole carries meaning for us.
Consider two tracks that are identical (forget copywrite for a minute). Between one that an AI generated and a human composed, I would personally grant the human-generated version more credit and enjoy it more. The story of how art is created and the stories of the artist are as substantial to appreciating art as a stroke of a brush or a note on a page. Computers will never replicate this until singularity.
First of all, I disagree with this premise, as the overwhelming majority of music either (1) doesn't have a particular story behind it at all or (2) becomes popular, and then people learn the story behind it.
Even accepting the premise, what happens when the next artist with a great story is simply using MuseNet to write their emotional pieces and passing it off as human? They'll be functionally the same, yet it still feels like something was lost.
What makes you think that a computer that can generate music cannot also generate a background for the "creator" of that music? It can give you all the stories that touch our hearts even more so than we can imagine.
Why generate a fake story? Why not communicate the real and moving journey of how a single note in the training data travelled through hundreds of neurons and thousands of matrices, and eventually made it past the final activation function to become a feature in the output tensor.
Given two stories, both identical, where one story is real - the real story will always be more meaningful because it has actually happened within the constraints of our reality, granting it validity and us the ability to relate to it.
Now, consider two stories, both identical, where one story is "real" and the other story is from a simulated universe. Now I'd say that both stories are of possibly equivalent value, since both have happened.
I kinda thank you for your comment, it gives me more...hope? :) (I'm an artist)
The same way when we see other human did something extraordinary that we think human can't do(based mostly on ourselves) For example, an artist who can draw something so life-like or sculptor who shape hard marble into soft, flowing clothes — with just hammer and chisel.
Human potential always intrigues us "What? Human can do THAT?" kind of way.
Yes, the machine and AI can do the same thing at the fraction of time, from the practicality standpoint, but it's not and never be the same — it's empty. It's just lifeless product and we never feel related to it.
I think that when placed against each other in this hypothetical, yes one would naturally side with a human (even if it is just out of solidarity), but what about when humans (who already claim the fame from songs written by other humans) claim the fame for song written by computers--that have no legal recourse? Would we just assume the music claimed by a human, was originated by a human?
It doesn't sound passable to me - it sounds boring, it's a hack around a text-parsing architecture ffs, trying to make it understand multi-dimensional and multi-timbral data... There are models that do better, and can "surprise and delight" you in different ways than a human would. Think about DeepDream and the whole experience of trying to spot all the weird doggie parts that the computer manages to sneak in those pictures - I don't think that a human could paint a DeepDream-dog picture nearly as effortlessly and perfectly as a computer can! I would definitely describe that as successful art, as far as it goes. But that doesn't mean that DeepDream "solves" visual art as a task!
Music created solely by machines will probably remain derivative and simplistic for a long time. I expect the biggest result of this research in the near term is that we'll be able to create tools that lower the skill and time required to create good music, kind of like an audio version of templates/autocomplete/spellcheck.
There are a lot of futurists and singularity types that take it personally when people disagree with their assessment. It's no big deal, but the open minded, progressive thing to do would be to have a debate and save the downvotes for trolls.
It's probably only a matter of time before we have a GauGAN like interface for synthetic music creation...so you could say 'i want a sad song with a soft intro and a buildup of tension here with lyrics covering these emotions and things which lasts 7 minutes'.
ML/DL is coming for a lot of the grunt work. It's coming for us as programmers as well. It's probably a few years away, but ML/DL
Given how easy it is to train a Transformer on any sequence data, and given how plentiful open source code is, I'd say "CodeNet" is probably less than a year away. OpenAI will probably do it first given they already have the setup.
I've been training on Stack Overflow and the model has already learned the syntaxes and common coding conventions of a bunch of different languages all on its own. Excited to see what else it's able to do as I keep experimenting.
Some sample outputs (you'll probably want to browse to some of the "Random" questions because by default it's showing "answers" right now and I haven't trained that model as long as some of the older question-generation ones): https://stackroboflow.com
I've tried it as well and got good syntactic results. For more sensical programs, I think we will need more layers & attn heads. Perhaps someone will fork gpt-2 and add the sparse transformer to it.
That CodeNet would be the SkyNet, essentially. What's shown here looks impressive, but it's the same good old text generator that can produce something that looks very similar to the dataset used to train it. It can't go beyond the dataset and generate something new. From the mathematical point of view, that generator interpolates samples from the dataset and generates a new sample.
To give an idea how big is the gap between MuseNet and CodeNet, we can consider a simple problem of reversing a sequence: [1,2,3,4,5] should become [5,4,3,2,1] and so on. How many samples do you need to look at to understand how to reverse an arbitrary sequence of numbers? Do you need to retrain your brain to reverse a sequence of pictures? No, because instead of memorizing the given samples, you looked at a few and built a mental model of "reversing a sequence of things". Now, the state of the art ML models can reverse sequences as long as they are using the same numbers as in the dataset, i.e. we can train them to reverse any sequence of 1..5 or 1..50 numbers, but once we add 6 to the input, the model instantly fails, no matter how complex and fancy it is. I don't even dare to add a letter to the input. Reason? 6 isn't in the samples it's learnt to interpolate. And CodeNet is supposed to generate a C++ program that would reverse any sequence, btw.
At the moment, ML is kinda stuck at this pictures interpolation stage. For AI, we don't need to interpolate samples, but need to build a "mental model" of what these samples are and as far as I know, we have no clue how to even approach this problem.
Yeah, I know what you are saying... But let's just let somebody try this experiment (and somebody eventually will), and we can judge what can or cannot be learned by the results.
We will definitely get a great code autocompleter at the very least..
Can you explain? I'm not an expert on ML by any stretch of the imagination, but you'd think with the sort of stringent logical coherence required to construct useful programs, it'd be a pretty subpar use case. Or do you mean smaller-scope tools to aid programming, like linters and autocompleters?
I wonder if you could find a representation for computer programs that eliminated all of the degrees of freedom that were syntax errors, leaving only valid programs. In a sense that's what an AST is but you can still have invalid ASTs. I bet it would be a lot easier to generate interesting programs in a representation like that.
There is cartesian genetic programming and some lisp-like models to encode a program as a tree where all combination are valid.
Combined with recent work on convolutional graph DNNs, this might be a good approach.
It's not passable...it's pretty obviously algorithmic.
The program does not have volition.
Why would you think that using statistics to generate a model of a piece of art (which is just data in the case of MIDI and pixels) would be "off-limits"? People have been doing this for decades.
No one knows the answer to your last two questions, but there is no indication that this program is leading there.
Pilot here - they used the example of a hurricane, however, I think it would have a daily impact on thousands of flights (general aviation and commercial) which all rely on on accurate weather forecasting. Weather is no joke in aviation; even if you're flying a 747.
You should negotiate with the hospital. You can normally get it down to 10% of the original amount and put on a payment plan. Their first bill is never what they think they'll receive. Its just their opening offer.
There are even services that will help you negotiate it down. (Half the reason for insurance isn't even their coverage - it's the negotiated rates.) Hope this helps you.
Capital controls make that pretty difficult. There are government set controls on whether you can purchase foreign currency and even then to how much you are allowed to buy.
I remember back in like 2011 Kirchner did this in Argentina while I was living there. There was out of control inflation and capital controls. The government also covered their ear and said "lalalalala I don't care what the world markets say, our currency is worth $x.)
If you were traveling, you could get foreign currency, but you had to apply for it, prove you were traveling, and then accept that the government would allot how much they thought you needed on your trip. I had a friend get $75 per day for their trip to the states. This creates the black market (or in Argentina, the "dolar blue") where the government said that the exchange was 5:1, but economics and the black market said 15:1 (at one point).
Moral of the story - you can not just ignore basic economic principles and dictate the value of your currency. Focus on building a strong and diverse economy and promoting a free market.
Mexico did this in the 1980's. It didn't work. It is strange that countries make the same mistakes over and over. I suspect that the Netherlands went through this centuries ago.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana
But I guess there's an element of "they did it wrong, we'll do it right" or "it'll work for us this time" or "this time is different because of x" and so on.
From what I can see, they're doing everything that they can to eliminate sending anything to servers. They recently launched private contact discovery which is really interesting.
Moxie has said repeatedly that they're working to do better on this front, but it's not without its technological challenges. He's written repeatedly about this and has also called for anyone willing to try to make it happen and offered to help them. Just one example springs to mind:
I don't believe this would even be an issue if they offered the option to not log sensitive data. I had requested that they provide something like this and someone quite senior reached out to me. He was very polite and professional. He explained that they had to keep this data for operational and compliance reasons and that all email providers are required to. However, that didn't resolve my security concern.
We ended up going with Mandrill which does offer the option to not log sensitive data ^1. Whether they log it somewhere else for the compliance reasons that Mailgun mentioned isn't mentioned anywhere in their docs or privacy policy, but doesn't seem to be accessible from everything I could find. You should never log or allow others to log password reset urls or other sensitive details.
This needs to be the #1 comment in the thread. If you use a transactional mailer, make sure you are not archiving emails with security-sensitive content.
That includes resets, username reminders, signin notifications, etc.
Also secure access to your transactional mailer account with 2FA and restrict access to those who need to be there (i.e. not your entire support team).
It's the opposite. That is a link to the section of the Mandrill docs, not the Mailgun docs. The view_content_link option fixes the security problem. (In theory, anyway).
Right. I understand that having that option lets you mitigate some problem. Can anyone expand on what this option does and how it mitigates the problem? Did I miss something from the blog post?
Sure -- AFAIK the problem was that Mailchimp was hacked, and the hacker was able to see and intercept the password reset links being sent to the customer by looking at Mailchimp log data. This option indicates that links should not be stored in log data, so even if an attacker has compromised your Mandrill account, they should be unable to see the exact reset links that are being sent.
edit: worth noting that there are obviously other ways a hacked Mandrill/Mailchimp account could be abused. This just shuts down one of the major abuses you could perform.
I live here too. We unfortunately have built a reputation of our value only being skin deep and superficial – from our real estate to our transit to our restaurants and nightlife to our startup community. This reputation is not entirely without merit; we need to do better.
Knowing all that – I want this to be amazing, but I am keeping my expectations in check. To me, this all seems too familiar. Lots of flash and shine, but I don't see anything concrete.
Most people there have always been from somewhere else, I didn't always fit in as well being born in Florida.
from above:
>>I don't understand why this entire field seems so focused on gaming, and not productivity
>Because they think that gamers will pay. Unfortunately, I see that they got a wrong idea. It has a vibe of a semibotched Kickstarter project, except backers here are not private individuals, but gigacompanies.
>A type of a gamer who spends 15k usd on a gaming rig to crush opponents in Quake 3 in ultracompetitive environment, will not care a bit about this toy.
>The founder of the company comes from a socioeconomic strata whose people have that characteristic. A Boston "old money family (R)" born man may see that selling gaming stuff to quite a lot of relatively rich people dumping 15k on a gaming rig is a good business idea, proceeds to build a company built around that idea with all audicious bold claims being received with accolades from other people like him, but never actually bothers to figure out what things matter in a gaming gear.
>If you have read his personal blog from naughties before he deleted it, you will get that his ways can be said to be well beyond "nebulous". He wrote stuff like "solving global problems" while maintaining that tone you usually see from people who flood the internet with something very insubstantial like "saving African children with Agile, innovation, and seven sigma framework..."
>Ok, back to the botches kickstarter line. As happens often with such projects, original claims performance get scaled down, company barely manages to deliver a downrated product after missing the delivery deadlines multiple times, product works so so, and in the end it ends in your drawer for good. A year down the line the company simply shuts down the cloud service for the widget and you are left with an expensive paperweight. I expect magic leap to follow this route.
then there's this:
>Given what is known about the mechanisms of high end confidence tricks, what is different about the operation of Magic Leap that indicates that it is not a confidence trick
Similar to the way that SV is decades ahead in software engineering, Hollywoood (Calif.) almost a full century ahead in moving picture entertainment, and Houston with its petro/chemicals, Ft. Lauderdale leads the pack in confidence leverage, selling to investors their very own dreams in the most "creative" ways like no place else. Lots of locations are desirable for different reasons and give rise to extreme leadership in regional specialties like these, where most outsiders are completely out of their element. Magic leap is already successful on its own terms without needing actual paying customers yet or even a shippable product, what's the hurry to put icing on the cake, even if it becomes possible? I wouldn't expect them to be as competitive at selling to customers compared to the pitches they have already delivered and won.
Vapor ware has existed much longer and more traditionally in hardwares than in softwares to begin with.
The most well-honed So. Fla. ventures always have a very realistic possibility of truly making money, the persuasive confidence being focused on distorting the probablity rather than on complete fraud. After all, fraud would be illegal, even in So. Fla. where you traditionally did not ask people what they do for a living, that would be rude since there's so little opportunity to earn a legitimate income compared to parts north. You're supposed to have money before you go there.
When I was a youngster Ft. Lauderdale was a much smaller yachting community, but more so than ever it looks like "hook, line, and sinker" will always be some of the most prominent pastimes enjoyed by those who specialize in this type of activity. All the yachtsmen I knew were only looking for the biggest fish, not interested in the small fry. That was for commercially viable fishermen who didn't even own a pleasure craft.
People probably don't have much memory from the last time, of course Port St. Lucie isn't exactly South Florida proper. Not as big a venture but could be considered a POC in an area not as thoroughly overfished as Broward:
With Facebook and all, everybody knows SV is where the biggest fish are these days. You go where the money is, or even better bring them to you.
Anyway, I am completely "confident" I could get a better return for the investors in Theranos than for those lured in to Magic Leap based on what each of these groups has to work with at the present time, if given the opportunity to steward each of these companies' present assets from this point forward. Surely I have seen what looks like some of the huge cash put into Magic Leap already trickle down into photonic advances that will make money for somebody someday, and from the looks of Theranos there have got to be some outstanding people in there somewhere with amazing breakthroughs that I would have an unfair advantage exploiting.
Only problem is, not so sure it would be a positive return for either one, the better bet may just be starting from scratch or getting in on the ground floor of a much smaller outfit in either case.
