Readit Newshackguru commented on How Judea Pearl Became One of AI's Sharpest Critics theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/stevenwoo
There are a lot of efforts in developing models that understand causal relationships within mainstream machine learning community. Mostly to train models that don't require a lot of training examples. Deep learning usually requires a lot of data and trained models are not easily transferable to other tasks. Yet humans tend to transfer their knowledge from other tasks pretty easily to seemingly unrelated tasks. This seems to be due to our mental models surrounding causal relationships. One example of such efforts is schema networks. It is a model-based approach to RL that exhibits some of the strong generalization abilities that can be key to human-like general intelligence. https://www.vicarious.com/2017/08/07/general-game-playing-wi...
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hackguru commented on The future is fewer people writing code? techcrunch.com/2016/07/22... · Posted by u/pratap103
You can't necessarily judge the future of of a technology by its past. Consider transportation. Imagine it's 1936, automobiles have been around for 50 years, but there are still plenty of people getting around by horse. Some people are claiming that in another 50 years, by 1986, horses will be hardly used for transportation compared to cars, other people say that horses have been used for thousands of years, there's no way they'll ever go out of style.
Programming languages exist today because computers can't handle ambiguity and don't understand software design. In another 50 years, machines will be a lot smarter, more able to handle ambiguity, and better than people at designing workflows and catching potential errors. Like the horse, no doubt some people will still prefer to do things the old way, but there's a good chance this will be limited mostly to academic exercises.
All they're saying here is that the tools we have will progress a lot in the next 50 years. There are some obvious problems with the way we design software right now which are due to human limitations. The only way to fix those is to remove a lot of direct control from humans and give it to AI programmers. Manually writing JavaScript in 2066 will be like manually carving arrowheads today: still effective but not something you would do for a serious purpose.
What do you mean by computers handling ambiguity? At the end of the day for a idea to become cristalized it needs to be free from ambiguity. That is the case even in human interactions. When using ambiguous language, we iterate over ideas together to make sure everybody is on the same page. If by handling ambiguity, you mean that computers can go back and forth with us to help us remove ambiguity from our thoughts then they are basically helping us think or in some sense do programming for us. That is a great future indeed! A future where actually AIs are doing the programming in long run! But with this line of thought we might as well not teach anything to our kids because one day computers will do it better. Specially if we already stablished that they can think better than us :)
hackguru commented on The future is fewer people writing code? techcrunch.com/2016/07/22... · Posted by u/pratap103
There is an upper bound limit for how abstract a general purpose programming language can become. Programming languages mainly exist because of their ability to remove ambiguity. Our natural language on the other hand is very vague. Many people might read the same exact article and interpret it differently. This is natural language's great feature. This feature is why a kid, without fully formed thoughts, can learn and use a natural language. Hence I don't see a day programming languages will completely fade away. Programs are result of a careful thought process that cristalizes a concept into a process and that process is only complete when you can describe it in an unambiguous language. One may argue that natural languages are capable of being not ambiguous. A subset of a natural language can be used without ambiguity but that is just definition of a programming language. Arguing programming languages will fade away is the same as saying math one day will not be necessary because we can explain all concepts in physics or other sciences in natural language.
hackguru commented on Master Plan, Part Deux tesla.com/blog/master-pla... · Posted by u/arturogarrido
I am in no position to question EM. But I was hoping he would give some good explanation for spending resources on SolarCity acquisition but nothing. Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was bought other than some hand wavy explanation about inherent difficulties of two separate companies working together. It still doesn't seem like a good purchase for Tesla specially at the moment. Solar car and SolarCity seem to only have the word solar in common :) TBH I am still fuzzy how expensive purchase of SolarCity can benefit a solar car manufacturing even in long run.
hackguru commented on A Method for Password-Less Authentication h4ck.guru/passwordless.ht... · Posted by u/hackguru
The bluetooth dependency looka painful. But I'm also highly skeptical of the behavioural analysis. I feel like a piece of malware could replay recorded behaviour and attack at 2:30am when the user is probably close enough to trigger an automatic authentication.
Since agents need to be authenticated once with users, the replay vulnerability should not be a concern. But a malware that sits on a client and potentially can access to agent keys can definitely be used to authenticate when phone is in proximity of infected machine. But that level of vulnerability on clients is pretty serious.
hackguru commented on A Method for Password-Less Authentication h4ck.guru/passwordless.ht... · Posted by u/hackguru
This sentence worries me: "any secure computation algorithm that can compare our choice of user behavioral signature without exposing it" because it makes it seem as though there are lots of these just lying around. It seems like this would be very tricky to construct, especially given the inherent fuzziness of a signature/fingerprint based on user behavior. Do zero-knowledge 'proofs of behavior' exist?
EDIT: That said, I do think this is a cute idea.
I knew someone will catch that. I was a bit sloppy on that sentence :) I will have to improve it.
1- We only need secure multi-party computation algorithm if we cannot trust the server. In cases that server can be trusted with behavioral fingerprints then we can use server to to do the comparison.
2- One can assume that in some cases the server should not know about the behavioral fingerprint. For example in case that this procedure is implemented as a service, it might not be proper to send client side mouse movement and key presses to the server. Still server can be trusted as a mediator but should not know anything more than fingerprints being almost equal. You are right that behavioral finger prints like mouse movement are fuzzy. Specially since agent and browser are running on two different threads they get different time stamps for each mouse location. In this case you have to introduce some acceptance for fuzziness as you mentioned. Some statistical comparison. This is not as easy as checking equality securely (like Socialist millionaires problem) but you can in theory turn any circuit and make it secure so that the circuit will only expose fuzzy equality and nothing more about the data. See secure multi party computation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation
But your concern is valid since in practice the computation involved to do secure multi party computation in this case might be demanding for a browser. I have yet to verify that in practice. Keep in mind that our case is a bit more relaxed than general secure multi party computation problem since we have a server that can be trusted a little bit. Maybe that can help us a bit in devising a secure computation scheme. Any volunteers to work on that? :)