Have you looked into profiling with strace? You should be able to see the actual system calls each of your tests are making. This will probably give you some good insights into what accounts for the speed differences.
D3 particularly excels at graph animations and data transforms (as might be helpful to facilitate graphing). Its one of the most comprehensive graphing libraries around. Well written code that uses it looks like pure elegance. Its amazing how much functionality you can get out of so little code. It does take some time and a solid understanding of javascript and scope.
This is the use case for universal basic income. Its largely not their fault for their current economic situation. They played by the rules. They worked hard. If we could only remove the "necessity" of a job and the puritan shame of unemployment to live a moderate life of meager means. People should be encouraged to contribute to society not to simply "get a job".
The solution to some people getting played by the system surely isn't to play everyone even more by that same system.
I figure UBI will look like it's succeeding for ~10-20 years, then we'll see what the real impact of it is (as people grow up with it). There's also little consensus on how comfortable the basic income should be; I get the impression that if it is too comfortable, you'd be a fool to work, if it's too uncomfortable, the bleeding hearts will call everyone a nazi until it's made too comfortable.
UBI is welfare with a different name. The results will be the same.
Some people will sit on their asses and never work a single day but the majority of the population would keep working. The extra money would become meaningless because prices would adjust to accommodate it.
We have to keep in mind that you can't just create money and hand it out and make everyone rich. If everyone had 10x as much money prices would end up going up 10x. The supply of real goods you can use that money for hasn't changed. The huge increase in demand would lead to a supply crunch and much higher prices.
The money we're giving out for UBI has to be taken from someone else. What UBI is calling for is wealth redistribution, something I'm in favor of. But people seem to think it's magic around here.
If we pillaged the top 1% and distributed their wealth evenly the entire rest of the population would get close to a 100% raise. That's how filthy rich the top 1% are.
> If we pillaged the top 1% and distributed their wealth evenly the entire rest of the population would get close to a 100% raise. That's how filthy rich the top 1% are.
The problem with this, of course, is that the rich would simply leave. They are the most attractive to rob, and the best prepared to escape.
In addition, "the 1%" is not an exclusive club; most people (currently) have a pretty good chance of entering the 1% at some point in their life, most in the 1% have a very good chance of exiting it.
> In addition, "the 1%" is not an exclusive club; most people (currently) have a pretty good chance of entering the 1% at some point in their life, most in the 1% have a very good chance of exiting it.
You can't be serious. Social mobility (to the extent it ever existed) is way down over the past 40 years, and there's no sign of that trend reversing.
I assume you meant the top 10%. In the US 56% of people will spend a year or more in the top 10%. 12% of people will spend a year or more in the top 1%.
The 1% for the most part aren't billionaires. Last year in the US, the threshold was just under $285,000. Ignoring professionals, plenty of small business owners can hit that on a lucky year. (And get hammered other years). There are a lot of jobs in the US with companies with fewer than 50 people.
Confiscating the assets of the 1% to create economic prosperity has been tried a few times before, and usually turns out horribly in ten years. You've removed the people who risk their own money from society, and replaced it with only assest allocation by bureaucrats.
Plus, as soon as you removed the one percent, then you have a new one percent.
As much as I like the idea of wealth redistribution I have the same doubts it will work. A similar phenomenon happened in South Africa when it was tried. The initial wealth distribution worked okay but it got rid of owners that knew how to run a business and replaced them with corrupt politicians.
As much as many of the 1% don't deserve it... A lot of them have that much money for a reason. The ones I knew, the "new money", were generally extremely intelligent and hard working before they made their millions. A lot of them are on permanent vacation now but if all of us had that much brains, charm, and grit it would be a lot easier to get rich.
This is what the paper says:
"Total family income is the measuring stick used to determine levels of affluence achieved. This is defined as taxable income of head of household and spouse, taxable income of other family members of the household, and transfer income of head, spouse, and others."
Based on what I know about US tax, you don't have to pay taxes on the first $500k in gains for your primary house (if married), and inheritances usually aren't considered taxable income.
The problem with this, of course, is that the rich would simply leave.
The rich can leave, but the profits their companies generate locally can still be taxed. And they can be taxed more when the money gets sent to wherever those rich people went to.
That's a pretty bold claim about people's chance to enter and leave the 1%. Additionally there are only so many places to run to and its not like peoples money is all tied up in gold that can be smuggled out of the country anymore. It's pretty easy for governments to just put a block on their accounts if for some reason the wealthy decided they could make all of their money off of a society and then bounce when it came time to share in that same society
The value of any currency is how much real stuff you can buy with it. If there's 20% more dollars in circulation each one would be worth 20% less.
This is why UBI is wealth distribution. Too keep the UBI money from being worthless it can't be printed money, it needs to be money taken from someone else.
It's not quite equal due to factors such as money velocity and liquidity. There's also the question of improved productivity/etc. to be had from this redistribution, which would increase effective buying power.
I mean, it is the case if UBI contributes to inflation, which it clearly would. Literature or no literature, if the money supply increases, prices will increase unless efficiency improves faster.
There's been plenty of inflation post-QE, just not in the CPI[1]. Housing prices post-crash are higher than ever, fueled by still-easy access to financing. Healthcare is up. Education is up. People are just taking the money that was shoved into the economy by QE and low interest rates, and using it for capital expenditures and investments instead of consumer goods. There's so much supply of consumer goods that the money is flowing to places where demand can't be met as easily.
> Just tax money a bit when it gets distributed to shareholders.
Well, that would factor in as a depression of dividends for all stocks; that would only reduce the value of holding stocks, sounds like it would backfire tremendously. Then you have the issue of whether or not to tax dividends to foreign-held stocks: if you tax disbursements, it would compound some countries' taxes and ultimately reduce the value of holding american stocks; if you don't tax foreign disbursements, then the people you're looking to tax would set up their holdings somewhere without a dividend tax.
Right, first I need to state that I would increase the income tax; anyone making about $100k would essentially pay extra as much as they received from UBI, and people making more would end up paying more than they'd get from UBI.
So the tax on dividends would just serve to cover the gap, not the full amount.
>>Literature or no literature, if the money supply increases, prices will increase unless efficiency improves faster.
No. This is one of the pitfalls of economics: overly simplistic models that don't (can't) properly account for external factors, and assume everyone has perfect information and behaves rationally.
I think for UBI to work, it has to be paired with a VAT/sales/transaction tax. Its also not a boolean: no UBI or gushing UBI. In fact it seems much more reasonable and palatable to start small with periodic up/down adjustments to keep the economy running (perhaps very similar to the current fed interest rate adjustments).
Surely at some modest level UBI is likely to greatly benefit the bottom (who will likely immediately inject the money into the economy). As with anything in life, yes, people will argue over it. That's probably a good thing.
I think UBI would be unsustainable without additional investments in education. If you are going to be taking public monies, that time should be used to educate oneself or provide some form of public service.
"We" don't do anything with people - we don't own them. They do whatever they want to do with themselves. Maybe art and crafts. Maybe some meaningless but interesting research. Maybe just live a life of pleasure. I suspect there'd be a lot of different answers. None of them are wrong.
Why do you have to do anything with the people? Certainly they will find something to do themselves, either hobbies like gardening or more serious endeavors like trying to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
As others have mentioned, I think requiring education would be a bit of fighting reality (with eventual automation outperforming humans in many tasks). I think, as in the current world, some people will naturally choose to produce and contribute while others will not. Largely this is okay... (open source software, wikipedia, school PTA groups, hacker news, ...). Encouraging people to contribute to society seems like an undebatable good thing, requiring them to do so, not so much.
What's the difference between running out of a UBI stipend, and running out of a paycheck too early? Either way, that addict is in trouble. At least UBI won't put them on the street when their addiction renders them useless for work.
IMO, long cycles in pay (weeks or a month) are suboptimal. If the money streamed in continuously, slowly, then it would only "run out" for a matter of minutes, although it would still take a while for a useful amount of it to re-accumulate.
I definitely don't follow the logic that they won't be on the street. If they run out of money they'll be evicted whether it comes from a job or the UBI.
Opiate addiction is an important, yet unrelated problem. With regards to UBI, its no different than a million other addictions (gambling, alcohol, social media, etc)... We, as a society should look at reasonable ways to address addiction issues of all sorts, coupling that solution with UBI implementation doesn't seem like a great idea.
Aren't your own thoughts similar to a CPU's registers or cache? One's thoughts seem to occur within the context of the brain and the billions of neighboring (to the ones inducing the current "thought") neurons. Its as obvious to me that you can't perceive another's thoughts just as surely as one CPU can't "perceive" the registers of another.
The perception of ones own thoughts seems very physical, as is the equally obvious (to me) explanation that you can't directly perceive the thoughts of another.
“You have to recognize realistically that A.I. is qualitatively different from an internal combustion engine in that it was always the case that human imagination, creativity, social interaction, those things were unique to humans and couldn’t be replicated by machines,” he said. “We are coming closer to the point where not only cashiers but surgeons might be at least partially replaced by A.I.”
I think the politicians will finally get it when income tax revenues start eroding (maybe as soon as this year?). I'd expect this to force a pivot to a sales/transaction tax model. Hopefully (but I'm not optimistic) this is paired with a final capitulation on the necessity of a UBI.
> I didn't think would be possible without someone very skilled in photoshop going over the images
And this is similar how deep learning will likely erode the need for programming (IMHO).
Deep learning won't necessarily write programs (any more than this AI manipulates images via photoshop). Folks that say, don't worry, we can't write programs easily with AI are missing the vector. Writing programs isn't necessary for there to be widespread disruption.
Most programming is essentially hooking up I/O (of which UIs are a subset) to APIs, data stores and data manipulation. The "goal" of programming is not the code, but the functionality it provides.
AI's don't need to learn to code any more than they need to learn to use photoshop. They need to learn to provide functionality (or in this case manipulate image data).
> "AI's don't need to learn to code any more than they need to learn to use photoshop. They need to learn to provide functionality (or in this case manipulate image data)."
This is interesting. My counterpoint would be that if you rely on AI over programs you lose human-editability and determinism. So fixing a bug or adding a new feature might mean diving into some opaque model rather than adding a few lines of code. You couldn't do anything where consistency is important, like security, manipulating a database with important information, or GUI design. I think that at least protects large swaths of software development.
Even this example seems less like a replacement for Photoshop and more like a cool new feature Photoshop could add
In the real world we rely on humans for lots of stuff, and humans aren't actually deterministic either. Sure, if you train someone to perform a task they'll probably do a good job, or they might suddenly come into work distracted and cause a problem. Diagnosing problems with people is often similarly hard, and we've had all of civilization to work on it.
This hasn't caused the sky to fall, yet. So, perhaps we'll just learn to make AI behave properly under most circumstances, and deal with failures and glitches as we always have with people.
_Coding_ is more about understanding what your boss/clients want and turning it into something more concrete, so it's merely a NLP problem. This will, I think, see adoption in "app/website builder" tools like Squarespace.
Then there is real programming, which IMHO will get automated in the far future.
Its a NLP problem if your boss/client wants to talk with you. At the end of the day, they don't really "want" to TALK WITH YOU, they want the functionality they get as a result of talking with you.
If there are other ways for them to efficiently get the functionality, they are good with that (as much as they might like you).
Similar to you wanting a pizza. You could call and talk with someone (which you don't really want, it was a necessary step), or you fill out the right form/app.
Either way, you want the result, not the process.
Your boss/client wants the result of your work, not the work process required to get it necessarily.
It seems likely to me that modern deep learning enabled tools will make it easier for your boss/client to get the result they want directly.
Deep learning + more graphically oriented data flow UIs seems like it will heavily erode the need for traditional programming as users will be able to more directly achieve the functionality they are looking for.
The planning an AI could take over from existing elevator controllers already uses constrained access to the motors. Nothing about AI demands stupid system design.
No, but AIs will override all elevator scheduling code. It just need to keep tuning all the knobs until everyone gets to their floor as fast as possible.
Not everyone would agree with you :) Although I think even most of us who enjoy programming would be happy to have some form of automation as an option.
Old fashioned PSTN lines would secure the full bandwidth needed end-to-end when the original call was established (which was really in efficient from a data utilization perspective).
With VoIP you are:
1. Beholden to the bandwidth/latency issues of the crappiest link in your end-to-end path.
2. Intentional use of poorer quality codecs (by your ISP and/or VoIP software to reduce aggregate bandwidth use). Ironically this can be inverted, there are codecs that sound much better than PSTN calls (but use more bandwidth).
> 2. Intentional use of poorer quality codecs (by your ISP and/or VoIP software to reduce aggregate bandwidth use). Ironically this can be inverted, there are codecs that sound much better than PSTN calls (but use more bandwidth).
I mean, people use G.729 for example because, yes, it is more efficient than G.711. But ultimately, if you want to communicate with the PSTN those are your only two choices and it's easier to just say "G.729 for everything" instead of wasting processing time on the server re-encoding everything that goes off the network.
You want better codecs? Bitch at the phone companies who have drug their feet on implementing G.722 while more and more IP phones and mobile devices continue to add support for wideband audio.
How are games and voice software targeted at gaming managing to make things so much more clear?
If it's a network issue, it's likely unsalvageable because the network is just crap. We need to be using whatever those are using. It is usually crystal clear and people are easily understandable even during large gatherings (EVE Online battles).
I'm the same as the OP, and what's worse, people talk 20 feet from the cisco conference phones (because those are everywhere) and it makes everything sound completely terrible. I don't listen half the time. That is definitely a microphone issue.
If you're audio sounds great for a network game and crappy for a phone call (to the same person you are playing a game with), its because some one (your ISP, your VoIP software, the other parties ISP, or VoIP software, or any network hop in the middle), is intentionally choosing poor quality codecs for you to lower your bandwidth utilization.
I've heard directly of novice VoIP engineers unintentionally taking out corporate networks trying to "help" improve audio quality, by picking a higher quality codec. It worked great when they tested phone calls in the middle of the night maintenance window. It really sucked the next day when packets started colliding. Crappy sounding codecs sound a heck of a lot better than 50% packet loss.
So VoIP can be better... at the expense of needing more bandwidth. During the session initialization the two VoIP endpoints handshake over which codecs will be used (kind of like the Accepts header in HTTP). Just like images, higher quality codecs tend to use more bandwidth (though like images its much more nuanced than that). Similarly like image formats there's different amounts of loss in the encoding/decoding of the voice data.
Voice has a major difference though. Its generally a real time protocol (its data packets are called RTP and sent over UDP generally). With images you can afford to wait longer for high quality images to load over a slow network. In a phone call that delay gets a bit annoying (to put it lightly).
Most people would rather trade quality for timeliness. You ISP would rather throttle your bandwidth and may not care about your quality (to a point).
Its quite a bit more complicated than that, but in a nutshell with VoIP, "higher quality" = "more bandwidth". If you don't have the bandwidth you'll have a very hard time getting better quality. If you have the bandwidth locally, then your provider or some network link along the way either doesn't have the aggregate capacity or may be actively throttling your rate to limit usage.
It really depends on which codec you're using. We had an implementation of G.711, which is not bad, but far from great. However, the license costs for implementing G.729 were so outrageous that my previous company simply couldn't afford it (or wouldn't). G.729 offers better call quality for the same bitrate, or similar call quality for much lower bitrate. Typically, G.711 would use ~64Kbps, whereas G.729 can achieve the same call quality for ~8Kbps (there's also a variable encoding that scales between 8 and 32Kbps). This being said, G.729 also requires a lot more CPU processing power.
If I'm not mistaken, each party of each leg of a call needs a license, which means that for a typical call centre with an IVR server between the agent and the customer, you need:
Summary:
- PSTN converter to IVR: 2 licenses / per customer
- IVR to agent: 2 licenses / per agent
- IVR to supervisor: 2 licenses / per supervisor.
It's pretty normal to see 300-agent call centres, and you typically want at least 300-900 calls waiting. Let's say there's between 10 and 30 supervisors.
300 * 2 + 900 * 2 + 30 * 2 = 2460 licenses. At $6-10 per license, that's more expensive than most hardware PBX solutions alone!
For IVR companies that handle multiple hundreds of thousands of calls per day, it's not really worth it.
Yes, codec licensing costs are one of the reasons people choose to not use the better codecs. Also, yes there is a CPU trade off as well.
The decision is more complicate with many trade offs. But in general, the OPs issues are either fundamental network ones or an intentional choice of one of his providers (typically for cost reasons - manifested in some manner).
I think there will be a growing need for things like this if housing spaces continue to get smaller (and cheaper). I think a service that offers several revenue streams would do well (and able to adapt to a changing market). Perhaps food and necessities could be sold, maybe part entertainment space (part arcade, coffee shop, sports bar, movie theater). Sort of a public living room. Maybe a modern take on the old fraternal clubs.
May be a bit early yet for this though. Would tend to displace other "hang-out" locations and businesses, so might be best to fit in with what's there (bars?), but offer something new and different (so people have an idea to anchor on rather than going entirely new concept).
