My wife only started learning drums a few years ago, and now she's regularly gigging with a band in a bunch of iconic venues around London. It's never too late to start! :)
I'm inclined to disagree. I believe the progress in music software has opened up new avenues and genres, it hasn't stifled existing ones. Instrument players are going to keep playing their instruments, just that now it's easier than ever for them to make their own professional sounding recordings and songs. On the flipside you have more and more people getting into music without requiring any formal musical background.
I also think the older we get, the more we think most music sounds the same because music inherently changes over time, and will be different to what we grew up on, but we also become more distanced from the subcultures and communities pioneering modern music trends. A young person today probably thinks all rock music from the 50s-90s sounds the same
I was at a conference called World Summit AI in 2018, where a vice president of Microsoft gave a talk on progress in AI.
I asked a question after his talk about the responsibility of corporations in light of the rapidly increasing sophistication of AI tech and its potential for malicious use (it's on youtube if you want to watch his full response). In summary: he said that it's the responsibility of governments and not corporations to figure out these problems and set the regulations.
This answer annoyed me at the time, as I interpreted it as a "not my problem" kind of response, and thereby trying to absolve tech companies of any damage caused by rapid development of dangerous technology that regulators cannot keep up with.
Now I'm starting to see the wisdom in his response, even if this is not what he fully meant, in that most corporations will just follow the money and try to be the first movers when there is an opportunity to grab the biggest share of a new market, whether we like it or not, regardless of any ethical or moral implications.
We as a society need to draw our boundaries and push our governments to wake up and regulate this space before corporations (and governments) cause irreversible negative societal disruption with this technology.
Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about.
Nintendo has a history of hosting competitive tournaments for games such as Pokemon (and even in a limited capacity Smash Bros). They even made a Pokemon game targeted at competitive players called Pokemon Unite, which they continue to organise tournaments for.
For Smash Bros in particular, they partnered with an e-sports company called Panda Global to officially sanction a circuit last year.
However, their awful track record with e-sports comes from mercilessly shutting down events they are not involved with (even when the organisers have reached out to Nintendo in good faith to discuss their involvment). They even go out of their way to dish out cease-and-desists at the last minute so that organisers don't have time to consider their legal options and rights before going ahead with the event.
There was a big scandal last year when Nintendo were having positive discussions about a partnership with a circuit called Smash World Tour then turned around and proceeded to threaten them just as the end of year finals were about to take place, forcing them to cancel an event that had been over a year in the making, and involving many professional players, hired staff and a lot of money (they could have just let them continue without being involved).
And just as a clarification, almost all these Smash events are not organised for profit by your big bad e-sports companies. Due to Nintendo's actions they have been mostly organically grown community-led efforts, all they want to do at the end of the day is have fun and play the game together.
Nintendo have shown time and again they will abuse their status as a big corporate entity to destroy harmless fan activity if they are not happy about it for any reason.
So just because you have a disdain for something in particular, you shouldn't project that onto a situation and use it as a false explanation for what's happening.
I'm not very knowledgeable with how compilers or language standards work, but would there not be security implications with this approach?
For example let's say a security exploit surfaces in the 2015 edition of Rust, would that not mean all the libraries declared as 2015 edition would have to be updated or abandoned in that case?
Or now that I think about it, is it instead the case that a whole program including all dependencies will be compiled by the same compiler (of which newer editions will have the latest security fixes), just that the compiler will always have to support compiling programs using legacy syntax when it identifies the crate's edition?
It makes me wonder how the world would cope today with a Bubonic Plague or Spanish Flu, those two I reckon would probably be more similar to your hypothetical Sci-Fi disease.
You can't think of a single reason why somebody might choose to leave the country they live in, aside from the most obvious one which would be because they could be earning more and be able to obtain a much higher quality of life?
Here are a few others:
- being in a persecuted group that is at-risk or discriminated against in their country of origin (due to religion, race, sexuality, gender, etc.)
- being from a country with a high homicide rate, or some other high risk of violence or danger
- wanting to provide a better education and quality of life for their family
- escaping abusive family or relationships
- Wanting to access companies or institutions where the skilled worker feels they can have a much larger impact through their work
Most of the "useful" tasks AI has helped us with are problems that are domain specific and lend themselves well to machine learning (for example object detection in images and machine translation as another poster mentioned).
However, what I think the poster meant was that just tacking on AI for the sake of it to a problem which most likely doesn't have an applicable use for it (which currently is the case for most existing IT projects or apps) is doomed for failure.
The NHS in the UK is suffering from huge administrative problems as well, due to ageing digital and organisational infrastructure which is becoming increasingly difficult to replace or modernise.
Now we are in a bit of a catch 22 where the costs keep increasing, and the government is always under pressure to spend more but there doesn't seem to be a solution to slowing down the increasing costs.
I really do hope I am wrong about this one, but unless a very strong wave of international regulation on the big tech companies comes in, particularly with regards to the gathering, storage and processing of personal data, then I see us entering a gruelling cold war over the next decade, the main players being largely the same (US vs Russia & China, with the EU and the larger middle eastern powers as secondary actors).
Reasons for this prediction:
- The likes of Trump, Putin, the brexit campaign have all benefitted from the normalisation of outrageous headlines and extreme/divisive views shared at mass scale and speed thanks to the ease of viral spreading of low quality media with ulterior motives.
- The hyperlocal targetting of individuals using their personal data has only exacerbated and optimised this phenomenon.
- Because of this it is easier for these divisive and populist politicians who run on policies of rash short term decisions to come into power, which will in turn lead to worse international relations.
- (more speculative argument) The algorithms which power social media and consumer advertising using personal data will placate the middle classes, feeding them what they think they want to see and consume and keeping them distant from the world's reality (e.g. what is already happening in China, Singapore) meaning populists can maintain control by getting votes/support from the more desperate people with their more extreme policies.
Unfortunately, I do not see the necessary regulation coming in soon, as the major players would never want to break up their tech giants out of fear of giving up ground to rival tech giants (e.g. amazon vs ali baba). On top of that, these governments have no incentive to mitigate the gathering of personal data by companies as they will want access to it as well for political reasons (domestic as well as international mass surveillance provides a big strategic advantage in the context of this cyber cold war).
There are many other reasons why I think these problems are being exacerbated but I have tried to summarise what I think are (and will continue to be) the main ones.
I don't agree with the person you are replying to either, however I don't feel much emotion for VCs who throw their money around and don't do their proper due diligence.
A property leasing company that sub-leases property owned personally by the CEO is a massive conflict of interest and a huge red flag, how these "professional investors" came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to invest is beyond me.
While the aviation industry, and as you point out low capacity flights in particular, is a major perpetrator for high CO2 emissions, the food industry is the number one area where your average consumer can make a big impact.
I agree with you that governing bodies should be putting more pressure on the excesses of the wealthy and on industry, but changing industry practices and consumer behaviour are not mutually exclusive, especially when we should be doing everything we can on all fronts to overcome this crisis.
I've been with monzo for close to a year now, and have been with their current account for the last couple of months, and in my opinion it solves pretty much every issue you have listed above. I couldn't go back.
Are you in the States? I have heard that Whatsapp is much more popular outside the US.
I live in the UK and everyone I know uses Whatsapp as their main method of communication while Snapchat activity seems to have dropped very quickly, perhaps in favour of Instagram, in my experience anyway.
I work in AI, specifically in the field of deep learning applied to computer vision. Not trying to discredit your comment, but can you provide some sources indicating that the type of models being trained which you have mentioned are approaching the notion of a general agent?
I haven't read much of the literature around deep learning, mostly only what has been applied to computer vision. But from what I understand, the general consensus is that the current crop of state-of-the-art deep learning models are very good at performing specific tasks (machine translation, object recognition in images, etc.), but are not so good at generalising across multiple fields. This seems more relevant to the domain of reinforcement learning (which does indeed include deep learning), which has proven to be a very difficult problem to solve.
It actually is where ToneMatrix originates from, and is still one of the useable synths in the DAW!