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I need some intellectual stimuli
- Thread starter Paulo
- Start date
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
At this point, without a direction, probably not. I am likely heading to bed soon. I'll gladly discuss areas that interest me - but I'm not going to be very good right now for just making something wonderful.
That said, there is a thread going on about rape right now and it has been sadly unfunny.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
Fucking old people, and those in comas. Also quadriplegics.
Although after awhile you miss the thrill of the fight.
I'm interested in cryptography, math, biology, chemistry, finance, the stock market, neural nets, memory, computers, and knitting.
If you want to start up a site that offers financial comments on the stock market for a subscription fee - you aren't going to be able to easily take credit cards without going through PayPal. That really has nothing to do with any of the above, but it is something I have had to deal with recently.
You could likely go through an offshore series of transactions to get around it, but that is what casinos and porn sites do, and they pay through the nose to do it, and having something totally legit and legal shouldn't have to go that route - especially since even going that route, it can't be as hidden as the media would make people believe.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Incidentally, I can't use iBill - regardless of their rules on what content can be purchased through their process, they restrict the amount.
WorldPay and the top 10 "normal" processors are out as well.
They all investigate prior to completing the process of setting it up as well - and they check up on it, so I can't fake it and then swap something else in.
I haven't tried writing to existing sites doing this sort of thing and saying "hey, I was thinking about becoming serious competition for you and I was just wondering how you work the logistics of it legally?"
WorldPay and the top 10 "normal" processors are out as well.
They all investigate prior to completing the process of setting it up as well - and they check up on it, so I can't fake it and then swap something else in.
I haven't tried writing to existing sites doing this sort of thing and saying "hey, I was thinking about becoming serious competition for you and I was just wondering how you work the logistics of it legally?"
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
Neural networks are slow and inefficient for real time processing. They are very quick once they exist, but to train and/or update them, in the computer sense, is time and processor intensive.
If you want little bots, then you are far better off using Markov Chains - statistical probability matricies. That is all that computer AI is, statistics.
As for the big boys and their cycles, you can either avoid them, or try to ride the waves. Just don't bother trying to beat them unless you are one of them.
People want to win the lotterly, but if they would lower their sites, there is much there.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
Right, still won't work.
It is not that huge a deal because if the service is legit and good enough, people will deal with the ways that are available to pay.
The main reason to try to get it as streamlined as possible is if you want to reach as many people as possible - but I'm not interested in that. If I had any more than 1000 it would be too much work and diminishing returns on that work.
But I need more than 5 and ideally about 10 for it to spill over the break even point.
Also, my "webhost" is me - I own a server and I write all the code - I would never let anyone else near this stuff.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
You lost me on that one. Sounds like you have watched too many movies and not read enough about the legit thing.
AI in computers is a sexy idea and makes for good science fiction, but all it really does is that it is a statistical representation of how things happen. Which, to be fair, is how the real world works as well, especially as you get down to the level of quanum mechanics.
Machines don't "know" anything - they can only build on experience.
If something sounds fantastic about an AI that you read about, it is likely because either the person writing the article doesn't fully understand it and is making it glam, or the person describing it to the author is the media rep and makes it fun.
That said - watch the movie Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. I have met Rodney Barnes and he is a fun guy. That stuff is a much more simplified idea and better - for certain applications.
Don't think and just react. The series of reactions to stimuli in the right order will look very much like thought.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
Shorts.
Assuming you mean the language - lots of things. Depends on what needs to be done and how fast it needs to be done.
For work, I use VB and Perl, although they are largely interchangable if you aren't in an MS specific setting.
For my own stuff, I use Perl, Java, C, and in web terms just PHP and mySQL.
Perl is fast to write and I can prototype code in it. If it gets the job done and is fast enough that way, then I will usually just clean it up and leave it that way.
If it needs to be much faster, then I will port it over to C.
If I need to do something where speed marginally matters, but memory doesn't at all, and I need very good error handling, a UI, and OOP, then I will use Java.
For the most part though, Perl and C for everything at home, and VB and Perl at work.
Once I am married and my company is in full swing, then I won't really need the other job and won't need to keep VB in there.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
A robot, I think it was in England, "got out" and it made the news. They were putting it away in its closet for the night, and it got out of its area and made it as far as the parking lot.
The news got ahold of it and made a big deal out of it. They made it sound like it was thinking because on the surface its actions are easy to personify.
The reality was that it wasn't at all smart, it was just designed to react to various stimuli and the right pattern showed up for it to look good.
The same way a toddler making it from the inside of your house out to your car on his own wouldn't be him running away, but that you left the wrong series of doors open and obstacle free.
He knows how to do one foot in front of the other and head for the light and boom, he looks like an escape artist.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
Not terribly so, no. If I did, I would likely just write it myself.
The interesting thing about patterns are that the same ones show up a lot all over the place. Hence why I think Wolfram's new book will be interesting once I can get it (they don't have it here).
Fibinocci comes to mind. Pi. Brownian motion like I described before. Most of the analysis that one does on fluid dynamics works out exactly the same on any system that involves many transactions. The El Farol effect works in the physical world as well as in markets and weather (although with weather it is interesting since there is no human conscious decision behind it - but in a mass market scenerio, the individual move no longer really matters anyway).
Fun stuff.
I gotta go to bed soon - I'm not tired due to coffee after my meal, but I know it is late for me.
NoDaddyNo
New member
Paulo said:
I have written code that does natural language analysis to determine if a passage is deemed "good" or "bad" or "neutral". Only in English. I have written tons of code that can learn from reading text and then generate new text from that - essentially, if I had enough data points of your writing, I could write a program that would write like you.
The program can go the other way and analyze writing to see if your patterns match that of someone else.
A lot of what I do sort of borders on AI - not in the sense that it would pass the Turning test, because it isn't trained for that.
