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Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

nytimes.com

41–50 of 191 posts

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#41
post #36
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be considered that you are intentionally missing the point by using an overly narrow and domain-irrelevant interpretation of "supercomputer". Do you think that the users of any of those supercomputers would turn down an offer to run their projects on Google or Facebook's fleet instead of their "one" supercomputer (given some time to adapt their software)

This brings me back to something I discussed here in the past - are there scientific problems that are simply not compatible with running in the cloud, and require a supercomputer? I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything where the performance would degrade enough with the increase in communication latency between components, that the increase in available (on-demand!) resources wouldn't keep up.

Well, 3D physics simulations a la finite difference or finite element are not trivial to break up for parallelization, because the state of individual cells is mathematically dependent on the state of its neighbors, so communication latency between loop cycles would be a bottleneck on a distributed system without some kind of clever optimization.

Edit: for clarity, finite difference and finite element simulations both involve discretizing a 3D volume into individual cubes (I believe other geometries exist, but are less common) and running an update loop which performs calculations for each of millions or more cells. Of course, models with spatially small divisions, and/or those designed to handle high frequency wave propagation, require potentially enormous amounts of memory (e.g. climate simulation, or large seismic dataset processing). Depending on what math you're solving, there are heuristics which you may be able to use to update only a subset of active cells, or divide up the model to split among multiple machines with minimal loss of accuracy while retaining high precision.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#42
post #18

> “The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” I'm not sure if I should be concerned that the leader of this initiative is wrong about something so trivial. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/

I think it's a metaphor tbh.

Yes, and putting the term between "quotes" (or rather, these 'quotes') would've avoided the confusion/discussion.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#43

Amen, hallelujah, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc With that out of the way: > Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft can help solve the problem, because keeping people hooked to the screen isn’t their business model. Isn't it? "How often do I use my phone, and how much does the price work out to in $/minute used?" is a real metric I consciously use to determine how expensive a phone I can buy. If I only used my phone for calling, tex…

The big 5 is a misleading concept because Microsoft, Apple and Amazon make money by providing actual products and services. The whole sleazy attention-economy stuff could be outlawed tomorrow and they wouldn’t skip a beat. Unlike the other two.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#44
post #43

Amen, hallelujah, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc With that out of the way: > Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft can help solve the problem, because keeping people hooked to the screen isn’t their business model. Isn't it? "How often do I use my phone, and how much does the price work out to in $/minute used?" is a real metric I consciously use to determine how expensive a phone I can buy. If I only used my phone for calling, tex…

The big 5 is a misleading concept because Microsoft, Apple and Amazon make money by providing actual products and services. The whole sleazy attention-economy stuff could be outlawed tomorrow and they wouldn’t skip a beat. Unlike the other two.

Amazon in particular has AWS, I think as a majority of profit. Apple and MS might care due to secondary effects, such as a reduced rate of mobile device replacement? It would probably not matter too much though, and they could adapt.

FB and Google would just implode with a wet thuck.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#45
post #28

With smartphones being ubiquitous, and we all have a few minutes here and there to spare...we just need to come up with a better and productive way to kill those time where you are idle. Any suggestions? Right now I'm waiting on my wife to get ready before we head out and spending it here on HN, but still, it's not productive.

What is wrong with being idle? Why has everything have to be productive?

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#46
There certainly appears to be a swell of anti-Facebook sentiment in recent times.

Leading in from a lengthy public discussion around it's role in Russia influencing the Presidential Election (the facts of that matter rendering the discussion almost comical), and a recent high-profile call-out by George Soros, I've noticed a glut of hand-wringing articles alleging it's clear-and-present-danger to the population and, in particular, children.

While I agree with many of Facebook's detractors, I will be paying particular attention to what solutions are proposed as the narrative develops. Given that some of the louder-voices were also heavily in favour of "Net Neutrality" regulation, I'm anticipating calls for direct regulatory intervention (as opposed to, say, pursuing violations of existing anti-competition laws, and eliminating anti-democratic lobbying influence of these and other entities).

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#47
post #28

With smartphones being ubiquitous, and we all have a few minutes here and there to spare...we just need to come up with a better and productive way to kill those time where you are idle. Any suggestions? Right now I'm waiting on my wife to get ready before we head out and spending it here on HN, but still, it's not productive.

Get ebooks and read.

[edit] sorry for being curt, but seriously: that can be all there is to it. It changed the way I use my phone.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#48
post #8

Facebook and other social media platforms might be heading for the type of reckoning the fast food industry had in the late 90s and early 2000s. http://marko.la/facebook-is-mcdonalds/

I wonder how much the push back against McDonald's is class based. It's not healthy, but the same can be said for a lot of the food we eat. A lot of fast casual burgers, which seem to hold a higher position in the public perception, have more calories. Of course, overall health is more complicated than just calories, but it's worth pointing out since that's one of the main complaints against McDonald's (including in the article you linked to). Cereal has declined in popularity, but it doesn't seem to have had quite the same negative stigma, even though a lot of it is simply processed flour and sugar (which was then marketed as being "part of this balanced breakfast"); neither do brands like Starbucks or Coke.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#49
post #30
post #18

> “The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” I'm not sure if I should be concerned that the leader of this initiative is wrong about something so trivial. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/

Technically true, but if you were measuring raw compute power it's possible that tech companies can beat super computers. (Numbers are hard to come by because companies are secretive about how many servers they have)

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