EastcoastEER

I was born and raised in southern WV, got my engineering degree at WVU. I love WV and always will - it's home. Yes, it' a different world compared to most of the rest of the country, and a large part of the state will probably always have serious problems, mostly due to lack of economic opportunity.

All that said, the only place in WV that I would be willing to move back to would be Morgantown. Just as WV is a little different compared to most of the rest of the US, Morgantown is different compared to the rest of WV - in a good way. And if you were last there for the LSU game, it's an almost night and day difference - I hardly recognize the place anymore. As someone else mentioned all the slums in Sunnyside are gone, replaced with large mixed commercial/apartment buildings. Lots of new residential development out towards the mile ground as well (going towards Cheat Lake). If you like the outdoors you will most likely love your time there.

Yeah, I was surprised to hear there was a dispute over his extension (asking for way too much). He isn't worth $4+ mil a year.

And I actually liked him - more than most of our fan base, at least.

FL, PA, OH, MD, VA.

Lurk around TD & rarely post, but put in about 3 hours last night and can offer some insights for those on the fence.

TLDR version: if you liked FC3, you will like 5. As others have said, it looks stunning on a nice 4K/HDR monitor or TV. In terms of gameplay mechanics, going from 3/4 (which were basically the same game, just in different settings) to 5, they seem to have done a soft reboot akin to what they did going from 2 -> 3; they got rid of / retooled some of the tedious bullshite. No more climbing towers to unlock the map, you now just explore and discover the world through normal gameplay (they even poke fun at that trope early on). I don't think you hunt/collect skins to upgrade your kit anymore, I think that's done via perks. No more mini-map, which I didn't like at first, but it's growing on me. Gunplay is good, as it typically is for far cry games.

I am admittedly early in the game, and no spoilers, but I was expecting the story to be more heavy-handed in it's social/political statements. I was expecting some blatant references to the current discourse in this country, but my impressions are that that the game really is just about killing some wack-job doomsday cultists, and it's more or less incidental that it's set in the United States (Montana) and the bad guys are modeled on a far-right Christian cult, though they appear to take great pains to have them not specifically reference the Bible and/or Jesus.

No worries man. A great cautionary take on this is the book Our Final Invention by James Barrat. It's a good read.

I actually first heard about the roaming packs of Russian programmers making shite tons of money on Wall Street in the Michael Lewis book Flash Boys, which is also a great read. Has nothing to do with AI, but a great insight into the rise of electronic trading, and in turn high frequency trading firms.

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That's already a reality, the stock market is completely run by AI.

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That's kind of my point - indirect, but advanced, research in making smarter and smarter programs is already taking place in places like Wall Street. And think about that - Wall Street sees advancing the intelligence of machines as a way to make a metric shite-ton of money. That should scare the ever-living frick out of everybody. They have more money to spend in order to advance machine intelligence than almost anybody.

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It's a very narrow version of intelligence, not really a threat to replace humans in anyway outside of it's narrow scope.

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That's true, as far as we know, right now. But again, its the speed of advancement, with no oversight, that is the danger. What is narrow today might not be in a year or two. The idea that narrow AI can't inadvertently progress to AGI is the type of thinking people in the field have warned against. It leads to complacency.

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I think this is a pretty unfounded fear. The only people with the knowledge and means to work on it are the Googles and the IBMs of the world and their motivations are pretty positive for humanity.

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Unless a lot the articles and books I have read on this subject are total BS, that is not true. At all.


Like I said the inadvertent emergence of strong AI is very real and terrifying possibility. A ton of people in countless fields that do not have the stated goal of "make strong AI" work with programs that could lead to AI. Neural net programming in finance, things like that. People just making a smarter, more efficient computer program to help them make more money in the stock market is just one example of this.

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I'm saying that we will have to navigate all kinds of social, political, and moral landscapes before we are even allowed to flip that switch.

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I don't know about that. AI research is essentially an un-regulated field of study. We don't even know who the hell is working on AI and for what purposes. Hell, some think we will develop strong AI / AGI inadvertently, in a field like finance.

A little nit-picky, but as I understand it, when guys like Kurzweil talk about the Singularity, they aren't talking about when humans merge their conciseness with machines, they are talking about the point in technological advancement beyond which we have absolutely no way to predict what will happen. In this case, the point at which machines achieve "greater than human" intelligence. Most experts agree once that happens, all bets are off, as it will most likely set off an intelligence explosion, where AI goes from just barely smarter than the average human to 100s or 1000s of times smarter in very short order (hours to weeks). Something 1000s of times smarter than humans is essentially god-like - we have no way to predict what it would, or could, do.

Been big into these types of movies since first reading The Big Short. Love Margin Call, and Inside Job will absolutely make you see red.

It's not a movie, but I would also highly recommend reading Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis, who wrote The Big Short. Truly eye opening. Deals with how global stock markets changed as they went fully electronic, and resulting the rise of high frequency trading (legal front running, basically). Will also, like Inside Job, make you wanna go kick puppies.