A $220 million per shot rod of God can burrow deep. How do you maximize the value of that shot? Wiping out a city? Taking out military target? Pfft, nay.
How can you make a $200M shot free up trillions in liquidity?
You target the bunkers of billionaires and wipe out all of the blackmail they store. That'll justify the high cost per shot eaaily.
If data collection can be sifted to discover behavior of groups...
And groups of people can have that behavior correlated to cultural and ethnic and racial factors...
Then, technically, isn't all of Silicon Valley violating the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s? For example, let's say black males statistically swipe phones a certain length and certain time... doesn't this mean ads targeting them can be engaging in disparate impact?
Maybe. If such a swipe gesture discrepancy existed, ML could pick up on it as a proxy for race, despite having no concept of race and despite no human directing it to do so. One example I've heard of is lending software learning to use zip codes as a proxy for race, then systematically denying loans to minorities.
Much more egregious than this though is for years facebook was apparently allowing realtors to target only certain ethnicities. This was a case of deliberate human-driven discrimination, and as far as I know nobody has been held accountable for it. So far the tech industry has proven itself pretty good at getting around the law.
> Then, technically, isn't all of Silicon Valley violating the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s? For example, let's say black males statistically swipe phones a certain length and certain time... doesn't this mean ads targeting them can be engaging in disparate impact?
Yes, and lawyers have had, and will continue to have, a field day in every instance that they can prove this is true.
Do you also find it odd that deadlocking a computer doesn't cause the cooling fans to stop and RAM refresh cycle to fail?
That is, what is the basis of "should"?
We have computer systems with a hardware watchdog. If the keep-alive heartbeat fails - like when the CPU deadlocks - it resets the computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_timer
Computers have multiple systems to help prevent total system shutdown. Why can't humans also have such?
The autonomic system doesnt have a global observer doing that job. No part of the brain has watchdogs to make sure it keeps doing what it's supposed to be doing. You instantly hit the homunculus problem assuming the brain had another brain watching it because then it would need another brain to watch that, ad infinitum.
That's all fine and good, but you didn't understand my argument.
I was objecting to your assertion that a "deadlock" would necessarily cause the autonomous nervous system to fail.
Since computers don't do that, why do you think that evolved systems - which have billions of years to build up robustness - must do that?
Your objection to the "homunculus problem" is not relevant. A watchdog does not need to be a "brain" in any but the most poetic sense. It can be switch on a timer, where the timer is reset by the system.
Computer can have deadlocks on many levels. I could write a multi-threaded program which deadlocks. Even though that's frozen, the rest of the computer could act like normal.
Since you didn't specify which sort of deadlock you were looking for, I pointed to ones which occur at the most recently evolved parts of the brain.
Shrug That wasn't the point. You said that if computers act like X then why don't humans act like X. I pointed out some cases where humans acted a bit like X.
You then asked why those cases weren't also Y. I pointed out that computers aren't always also Y, so why did you think that humans with X must also be Y?
I am not implying a global watchdog, for the simple reason that distributed computing systems can have local watchdogs which reset a node when the node is not active, even without global intervention.
The mechanisms can be different - animals swim while submarines don't, but both move underwater. My point was that I disagreed with your intuition and conclusion, and since I can find one counter-example to show that X doesn't imply Y, you can't conclude that X must imply Y. Nor can you conclude my counter-example is the only possible mechanism.
You still haven't described the basis for your intuition.
Distributed systems also deadlock in ways that local watchdogs can't account for. You still imply the global watchdog of the brain of the systems designer to navigate those problems.
All of your examples require a human homunculus to steer a system away from deadlocking.
The brain doesn't have an architectural homunculus to do that for it, and yet, it does not deadlock in any way resembling the deadlocks we see in computer science.
My question is how did the brain do this without a system architect? How can natural selection have a bias that prevents deadlocking in neural compositions?
While you haven't expressed the source of your intuition, based on your answers, you see the architecture of human-designed systems, which are engineered based on economic considerations, as being predictive of what natural systems are like.
This is not, generally speaking, true.
Even when built on standard computing architecture, we see that designs influenced by evolutionary design can result in "bizarre, mysterious, and unconventional" designs. I'm quoting from Thompson and Layzell's "Analysis of Unconventional Evolved Electronics" (1999). In that paper, note that the evolve system had a different response to temperature change than the "brittle failure" of normal digital circuits. System crashes like what you describe are "brittle".
Evolution, by human design senses, is incredibly wasteful. We are not going to build computers or distributed computing systems that way, hence any intuition based on those design principles are likely not applicable.
You asked "How can natural selection have a bias that prevents deadlocking in neural compositions?"
The "how" is easy - organisms with hard crashing deadlocks don't reproduce.
You want to know what that mechanism is, which is a different question.
If you really want to understand this, you'll have to talk to biologists who focus on this sort of topic, not a "hacking news" sites.
Veganism is a spectrum. Some are fine with honey, others find it exploitive. The interesting thing to me is the principle that is so important to warrant a conspicuous lifestyle change and how it maps to other issues.
I think the most common goal of vegan or vegetarian diets is to reduce animal suffering, not to eliminate any part of your life that is even adjacent to animals. As you've pointed out, the latter would be impossible.
The printing press was subsidized by the Catholic Church as a way of reducing costs and increasing spread of their primary asset: the Bible.
They didn't realize this would drive down startup costs of presses by creating more press techniques and technicians looking to acquire new customers. With Church backing, the bar-to-entry for spreading information dropped until anyone could spread information, including anti-Church factions such as the Protestants. This did not end up well for the Church.
The same is true for America, their obsession with spreading democracy, and the transistor AKA the American Printing Press.
Once information propagation becomes cheap, noise floods everything, and trolling is the only effective way to create lasting context.
Study your body like you would a machine or a program or a puzzle. Understand how your muscles respond to stimuli. Figure out how your nerves transmit intensity. Discover what forces your body to move against your will. Given your submersion in the hormonal hilarity that is puberty, you're going to spend a lot of time on autopilot, so step back and observe your body being commanded by primal forces.
Once you build this map, you can begin to monitor and track how external factors drive you. Memes, TV, movies, music, conversation... all signals designed to persuade and hijack your behavior. Spending time here will give you much needed clarity of self and begin laying the foundation of empathy for others.
Friends appear once you have this map as you will have unintentionally filtered out those who will exploit the unexplored regions of you.
Given the shockingly naive comments about drone disabling being proposed, I'm going to assume only a very tiny handful of people who visit this site has ever flown or seen a drone before. Let's cure some of this naivety:
- GPS jamming doesn't jam video feed.
- Wifi and radio jamming doesn't stop landmark-driven/return-to-home navigation.
- UK refusal to fire on the craft is absurd because rubber bullets, simunitions, and less-than-lethal rounds are more than capable of destabilizing the hull and structure of the craft... while inflicting no damage on distant landed craft or personnel. (I wouldn't expect HN to know this, tbh)
-Sending piles of off-the-shelf consumer drones up to ram into it would have been sufficient as well.
Because of those last two points, the bumbling incompetence of UK security forces suggests to me that this event is purely pretext for even more rigid anti-drone legislation in a country that already has extreme anti-drone legislation. If true, then the question is, "What has changed that has made Airstrip One suddenly paranoid about drones?"
It seems to me that yourself miss a couple of points:
- the drones were flying high. Show me any sharpshooter that can shot down a highly agile and impredictible target at 200m high. Clay pigeons are shot at 60m on a very predictable trajectory, and even that requires a lot of skill and training.
- drones flying on preprogrammed path are impossible to intercept electronically, with the exception of GPS spoofing. Even that is difficult, never mind deploying GPS spoofers around the airport
- it would make the airplane operations impossible, so can't fly while the GPS spoofers are running, and when they're not running, there is drone flying
- the complexity of keeping drones in the air for long times (replacing batteries, field repairs, having spare parts) is not to be underestimated. This suggests a planned operation
I wonder if it is possible to disable a drone with a barrage of powerful air vortices. This would solve the GPS/camera navigation problem without disabling aircraft systems, and it would prevent any collateral damage caused by launching projectiles in the air.
>- UK refusal to fire on the craft is absurd because rubber bullets, simunitions, and less-than-lethal rounds are more than capable of destabilizing the hull and structure of the craft... while inflicting no damage on distant landed craft or personnel. (I wouldn't expect HN to know this, tbh)
I think the only naive person here is you.
Firstly rubber bullets like those used for crowd control are fired form either a special barrel break or from a 40mm underbarell attachment (grenade launcher).
These are disks made out of steel covered with a thick layer of rubber and they are inaccurate as fuck, you will not hit a man sized target even at 50 yards with them yet alone a drone.
The other option is various shotgun polymer slugs which have a slightly better accuracy but still hitting a drone size target is nearly impossible.
You’re best bet is birdshot it then again you are limited with range.
However you still have the issue that the police isn’t trained nor equipped to fire at drones and until they can be achieved they have no option.
And even if you train those policemen to effectively hit drones those drones aren’t easily accessible and fly out of reach.
The previous incident last week which also shutdown the airport had a drone at 10,000 feet, but even a few 100’s of feet would put the drone outside of the range of anything that you could plausibly use at an airport.
That said since these drones only have a short loitering time and even if they are shot down the police still needs to investigate and clear the area to ensure that there are not other drones and to collect any evidence and statements you don’t gain anything by shooting them down the airspace would still be locked down for just as long.
So when your decision is to try to shoot drones you likely can’t hit to cut their loitering time by 5-10 min at best while potentially endangering the field or people or to wait for them to fly back to their owner in the hopes of catching them it’s not a hard decision at all and doesn’t show any level of incompetence on the behalf of the British police.
P.S. in every case effectively the shutdown came after the drones have left the area already, they are only there for a few minutes the airport is huge by the time the police can even get close they are gone but then order is then issued to ensure that there are no more drones in the area.
Unless we will start putting on phalanx installations every couple of 100’s or yards around the perimeter of the airport there is no kinetic way to shoot these things down.
I don't really wanna call this a "solved problem" because it's certainly not, but there /are/ off the shelf anti-drone munitions and have been for a while:
I too think it's very weird that the UK government apparently doesn't have /any/ specialized antidrone munitions around and refused to attempt to fire anything at these drones.
These munitions are more or less a joke they only work in ideal conditions and have a range shorter than normal kinetic projectiles.
By the time the police arrives the drones are gone and nothing can shoot down a drone at 10,000 feet short of a man portable surface to air missile.
Even at the maximum altitude allowed for these drones which is 400 feet you wouldn’t be able to hit it reliably with anything that isn’t terminally guided and man protable with maybe the exception of a high powered scoped rifle and a very good marksman.
But again the problem is that these drones don’t stick around for hours they are gone in minutes, by the time anyone can get in range they would be long gone.
Edit: looks like they are deploying or have deployed (since this if from the Daily Fail) a military grade drone detection system with some soft and hard kill capabilities that the British armed forces purchased for troop defense in Syria and Iraq:
The back up batteries at Fukushima power plant were capable of being recharged, thereby avoiding a meltdown. However, the connectors hadn't been manufactured for years and nobody could jury rig something up in time to avert disaster. Humans make really stupid oversights on things that happen rarely. In hindsight it's really stupidly obvious that something should have been prepared ahead of time. But when looking forward, it's easy to overlook obvious things because the potential number of future problems is infinite. "Are we prepared for a drone attack?" The first question is, "What does a drone attack look like?" That they didn't get that far doesn't actually surprise me.
The wild speculation happens for every subject area here. It's obvious in areas that I know anything about, and it also reminds me to take everything else outside of tech's core competencies with a huge grain of salt.
Illegal drone operations are similar to running a charity to commit fraud. The primary mode of operation is the honor system, not having a bunch of agents ready to stop criminal activity the instant it happens. But now that it's happening, the central motivation is to capture the perpetrator. That's a necessity to show there isn't some government conspiracy to expand power, that someone really did urinate in the swimming pool, and show the seriousness of the consequences.
This isn't a case of larceny, it's wholesale asset and trust destruction. There's millions of pounds of costs associated with this event that cannot be recovered from the perpetrators. So throwing the book at them, however overcriminalized it might end up being, is going to be the main means of deterring future events. And that's because we don't have a drone police force, yet, to nearly instantly apprehend drones coming into an airport's perimeter. What are we going to do, deploy such things for thousands of airports? You really want people to be incentivized to adhere to the honor system, even if it's a coercive disincentive that you're going to lose your freedom if you decide to piss in the pool in this manner.
> - UK refusal to fire on the craft is absurd because rubber bullets, simunitions, and less-than-lethal rounds are more than capable of destabilizing the hull and structure of the craft... while inflicting no damage on distant landed craft or personnel. (I wouldn't expect HN to know this, tbh)
What do you think the effective range of less-than-lethal rounds are? Now, how are you going get that close to the drone? (Without doing something truly insane like firing out of a helicopter that's trying to fly close to a drone of course)
> -Sending piles of off-the-shelf consumer drones up to ram into it would have been sufficient as well.
You're going to have piles of consumer drone pilots on call?
npm install goldmansachs