Alloying copper with tin to make bronze produces a material which is stronger and more durable than either component, and this works because the tin disturbs the copper's crystal lattice, which restricts the mobility of dislocations, which in turn reduces the plasticity of the alloy.
I do not know if cellulose fibers have a similar effect in ice, but in general, if you can trade the feature that is causing a problem for one that will not, you are improving things.
If the temperature dependency is implemented via a deterministic pseudo-random algorithm, then they are deterministic. If, on the other hand, the output is at least partially causally dependent on a source of environmental randomness, then, even though everything 'inside the box' is deterministic, the process as a whole may or may not be, depending on whether the source of environmental randomness is, and that is ultimately a question about fundamental reality.
For every user asking questions and facing issues for such-or-such firmware or software support they need in their projects, that same user would have appeared regardless if their Pi came from RP directly or through a reseller.
Every board sold would have been an extra user, the reseller isn't adding full users (although they may increase the indirect customer base!), so even gaining a user through a reseller increases the amortization divider for the support burden.
Now lets consider RAM chip support burden, the original Pi RAM chips can have issues generating support burden, and so can the reseller RAM chips. Unless RP foundation refuses to upstream link training / RAM bringup patches from resellers, there is no real additional support burden.
In fact if RP were a little more creative, they could have tried contacting the resellers to explain they can continue their modding business as long as they advertise it clearly as modified, and to inform them they will be receiving units that didn't pass the RAM tests from the automated lines, since they're going to desolder the chips anyway, this can save costs for RP foundation.
I also wondered why trains were supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not. My spur-of-the-moment, totally uninformed guess was that, in the case of shipwrecks, the sea (or, more generally, the marine environment) was regarded as the killer. The scenarios that Richard Posner is writing about seem somewhat different, however, at least in that after a shipwreck more serious than a calm-water grounding, there's often nothing much to seize.
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
It makes the premise of the entire site flawed, though. And it defeats the purpose of the convenient button provided to redraw a year. That is what should allow you to find a pick that might be more interesting, rather than messing up the randomness promised by the site and the HN title.
IANAL, but it seems the suit against Harvard is still in progress, as far as I can tell: Harvard is seeking a summary judgement, and on August 5 the judge granted Gino's request to file "a renewed Statement of Additional Material Facts that complies with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Court's Standing Order, including the requirements governing format and organization" [1] with 14 days to reply and 14 days thereafter for Harvard to respond in turn. It looks like Gino's team filed the former on August 26 [2].
From the Introduction, the gist of this statement seems (to me) to be that Harvard's finding of grave misconduct cannot simply be taken as being correct, and so the issue should be put to a jury.
Harvard has counter-sued, apparently alleging that Gino had altered and backdated an Excel file presented as evidence that Harvard's investigation had used the wrong data - a claim which which she, of course, denies.
A year ago, the judge denied Data Colada's request for Gino to reimburse their legal fees after the dismissal of the case against them, which strikes me as unfortunate.
When John Searle first published his so-called "Chinese Room" argument (https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/7150/1/1...) he included his responses to several counter-arguments that he had been presented with in prior discussions: the systems reply, the robot reply and so forth. Interestingly (as it turns out) no-one seems to have argued that this was a task that could be completed without any understanding, but now that AI technology has reached the point of being able to implement the Chinese Room, it has become the fallback position of those who insist that true AI is impossible!
This is not an argument for true AI being possible, let alone already achieved; it is a warning about depending on arguments from incredulity, which are particularly susceptible to future developments.
The problem with philosophy is that someone can present an argument that is pretty dumb, everyone can point out it's dumb, people can show evidence that it's dumb, reason through how dumb it is, and publish articles about the many different ways in which it's dumb, and still it gets trotted out as if it counts as evidence for some argument. Searle's Room was debunked immediately upon being suggested: the "Systems Reply" is the debunking. His response was: "but if you take all the knowledge out of the system and put it in the person, then the person still doesn't understand Chinese!" Which is obviously false and immediately collapses his entire argument down to nothing. He starts from the premise "this person doesn't understand Chinese; he is just following instructions that are written down for him" and then immediately rejects his own premise and say "actually he does understand all of Chinese and everything he's doing, but he still doesn't, you know, understand it, see?" It's completely embarrassing.
Searle's Rooms is a fully rejected and rebutted argument, and Philosophy will never be (and never has been) a serious discipline until it figures out how to actually let go of failed arguments.
Huh? How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese? Memorizing instructions to the point that one can mentally follow them doesn’t imply understanding why they work. If the person doesn’t understand the correspondence between the Chinese written words and things in the external world, then surely they don’t understand Chinese in the sense we generally mean when we talk about whether a person understands Chinese. (I think this is related to the robot reply?)
That’s not to say that I think the Chinese Room Argument is convincing. I don’t think it is. Or, I guess it might demonstrate something, but not what it aims to show.
I would argue that if, say, the person who has memorized this program and mentally executes it, and if this program also includes actuating some levers to control a mech or something, and the program (running via the person mentally going through the instructions by rote) takes actions to pursue some goals (e.g. purchasing some wood by conversing in Chinese and building a tower with that wood), while the person on whom the program is running wouldn’t know how to order a cheeseburger in Chinese,
Then, the program running in that person’s head might well understand Chinese even though the person doesn’t. (Whether or not the program actually understands Chinese, I think probably depends on the specific of the program in ways that I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t expect that any program that would understand could be small enough that a human person could memorize it and execute it by rote in this way, but this is a thought experiment and such issues can be disregarded I think.)
The point is that Searle's entire exercise is to show that there can be execution without understanding, and he does this by creating an agent whose only purpose is blind execution of rules. Since this agent doesn't have the understanding, there must be no understanding.
Critics immediately point out: yes, there clearly is still understanding, it's just in the system itself -- the program. The fact that the person does not have the understanding doesn't mean the understanding is gone.
His response to this is: but what if the system was the person's brain!?
Okay, so either it doesn't address the criticism at all (there is still a system of rules that contains the understanding; who cares whether that system is internal or external to the person's brain?) or it completely destroys the original premise of the argument, which is that the understanding is not in the person! You can't put the understanding back in the human agent and still claim the human doesn't understand what they're doing! His entire argument relies on the fact that the human agent obviously doesn't understand Chinese, and then says, actually, their brain contains everything it needs to know to have completely fluent conversations in Chinese. So the person does understand Chinese!
> How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese?
How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?
>How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?
Notice that the man while having memorized the rulebook can't convey any fact of his childhood in Chinese. He can only convey facts encoded in the rulebook, perhaps of a hypothetical childhood. The point is there are different ways information is stored in the brain; one way is through rote memory, the other is something like semantic memory. The rulebook encoded as rote memory doesn't endow his semantic memory contact with the meaning of the symbols. Hence the man doesn't understand Chinese.
This doesn't render the Chinese argument successful. The system's reply still stands when understood properly. I like to call it the virtual mind objection. Physically executing the rules in the rulebook just instantiates a virtual mind. Whether the man is reading the rules from the book or just pulling them from memory is irrelevant.
Because they can’t use Chinese to speak about things they encounter in the world?
Like, someone asks them in Chinese whether they are hungry and want some food, and they answer based on the program, not based on whether they are actually hungry, because they don’t understand the words in a way that lets them use them as a person who understood Chinese would.
Again, I don’t mean to say that in such a situation that there is no understanding of Chinese happening in their head, only that this doesn’t constitute that person understanding Chinese.
It seems to me very strange to want to say that the person with the simulation in their head understands Chinese. They can’t do the things that understanding Chinese lets people do.
Perhaps the program the person has running in their head is even a person, a moral patient and a moral agent, and one who understands Chinese. But the person who is running (by rote) the program, doesn’t thereby understand Chinese. They may “contain understanding of Chinese”. The understanding is definitely happening in their brain. But they don’t understand Chinese.
> How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese.
They don't, they have simply memorised a translation function which takes Chinese as input and returns Chinese as output. They don't have facts or information about the Chinese language - they don't even need to know what language they are speaking!
When the person reads 汉堡包, do they understand what that is?
Assuming you don't speak Mandarin, do you understand that word? If not, how could you claim to understand Mandarin? Even if you could use the translation function to speak it, you still don't understand it. Remember that the translation function is Mandarin -> Mandarin, so if you don't understand Mandarin you cannot use it to gain an understanding of the word.
The person who memorized the book doesn’t understand Chinese. In fact they don’t even understand that Chinese isn’t a language. Searle’s response stands.
So you could put this person in a room with a bunch of native Chinese speakers, and he could hold conversations fluently with all of them. Yet you claim he doesn't understand Chinese? How can you possibly defend that? This is very close to "zombie theory" -- everyone else is an automaton except you. Nobody else has real thoughts. That obviously fluent Chinese speaker doesn't really understand Chinese.
If the person was told in Chinese to jump in the air, would they be able to follow that instruction? If they actually understood Chinese they would. But since they don’t and they’re just mechanically translating symbols without actually understanding the language conceptually they would not know to jump.
> What's stopping the book from containing that information?
Because in the thought experiment, the translation function (which is what you mean by the book) is f(Chinese) -> Chinese. If you don't have knowledge of Chinese, it won't help you.
We can also play a little game. I’ve invented a language called Kejdoke.
Me: Jeheixis ownc j’Lm hys bjækf¿
You: Kloften¡’by
You should be able to tell me what this exchange was about. Since any reasonable definition of understanding for a language would be to do this, and you have the same knowledge of Kejdoke as the person in the thought experiment has about Chinese. If you can't tell me what this exchange was about, the person in the thought experiment could not understand either.
This just alters the thought experiment. What the thought experiment offers is a book of opaque rules, just instructions on how to transform symbols into more symbols without any concern for their meaning. What you're offering is a translation dictionary, what does it mean when one encounters X symbol. You're giving him a book on learning Chinese.
It only takes a finite number of rules to generate a mapping between unbounded strings of finite symbols. The brain doesn't contain an infinite amount of information after all.
I do not know if cellulose fibers have a similar effect in ice, but in general, if you can trade the feature that is causing a problem for one that will not, you are improving things.
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