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Banazir

The Wikipedia article about the technological singularity attributes the seminal idea to Irving John Good (b. 1916), a renowned statistician who taught at Virginia Tech:

Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs ( Read more... )

Meaning: Put up, or shut up.

(One of zengeneral and masaga's roommates in their undergrad days was Jason Lamm, the third student who worked for me as a sysadmin. After I bought the four 1GHz Athlon XP Thunderbird systems that became known as the "New Elves" from a Russian distributor in 2001, Jason and I used to quote the over-the-top accent that Malkovich's ( Read more... )

In my previous post on the technological singularity, I alluded to Ray Kurzweil's "argument from hardware".

The essence of the argument goes as follows: When Moore's Law gets us up to a number of switching elements that is comparable to the number of synapses in the human brain (about 1014 for between 1010 and 1011 neurons), a sea change in ( Read more... )

Those of you who attend conferences in artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks may recall the perennial futurist talks by such notables as Karl Pribram (who's presented technical papers at IJCNN many times, including in 1996) and David Stork, well-known "optimistic" futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Thaler - and also the ( Read more... )

As I advise my students, I often find myself reviewing "nifty tools" and time-saving tricks of the trade with them.

Examples of these include:

• Citation Indices and Bibliographic Services: Google Scholar, CiteSeer, DBLP
• Search tricks: Googling for authors by name, doing a breadth-first search of a citation index, using synonymy, using Google ( Read more... )

(The title of this post made more sense when Dapper Drake was the current version, but hey, I'm only... five distros out of date, right? I'll get caught up...)

I've designed Kaos I so that it can dual-boot as a unit in an Ubuntu cluster. Anyone else have a Beowulf cluster of atomic supermenLinux cluster? What do you use it for?

ETA, 08:35 CST ( Read more... )

So, what is a good use for a Blade of Kaos?

How about as massforge render farm nodes?
Or for comptranslation work?

ETA, 08:20 CST Mon 17 Nov 2008 - As it happens, a year and ten months after Kaos I was first built, masaga is running comptranslation stuff right now on Fingolfin! So, this could work out.

( Specs of Kaos I )

( Read more... )

Elric of Melniboné, last of the Bright Emperors, cried out, and then his body collapsed, a sprawled husk beside its comrade, and he lay beneath the mighty balance that still hung in the sky. Then Stormbringer’s shape began to change, writhing and curling above the body of the albino, finally to stand astraddle it. The entity that was Stormbringer, ( Read more... )