docmarionum1

An essay I wrote tracing the 80-year evolution from Vannevar Bush's 1945 vision of the memex to Geoffrey Hinton's contemporary warnings about artificial intelligence.

Shout out to the Advent of Computing podcast (https://adventofcomputing.com/) for finally getting me to read Bush's classic essay. As I read it, I was struck by the parallels in AI today.

Taking Ethereum as an example, if I exclude the known institutional addresses (taken from etherscan's tags), the results change very little. The top 1% has about 92.5% of the ETH. Obviously many of the untagged ones could also be institutions, so in that respect, yes, it's "useless" because we can't know exactly who controls every address.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I just happened to start my own gag @reply bot last night, https://twitter.com/AssHobby, and quickly hit this same problem. I tried to get clarification on what I was doing that was different than a bot like StealthMountain but of course just got a canned response that answered nothing. It really can't be anything other than followers count or special exemptions. Maybe drastically reducing the frequency such as sublimino is doing would help keep it off their radar. But a definitive answer would be nice.

Open-sourcing the code would only be the first step. To make the experiments truly reproducible, you also need to know the hardware and software configurations used to run it. Different package versions could lead to different results. And, for instance, if you're running your code on one of those old Pentium chips with an error in the FPU, that needs to be know.

I'm currently working on a platform for scientific programming. One of the ultimate goals is to include a provenance system which will be able to tell you everything about what generated the final results, including that of input data if it was derived on the system. That way you might be able to have a complete history of where a particular result comes from.

I agree, you definitely want to keep some sort of free tier. There are a lot of apps out there that claim to do this, or something similar. After trying a bunch of them I found one or two that I liked, but for the most part they weren't very good. I would not have wanted to pay to find that out.

I think you wouldn't want to offer less that one full alphabet, so people can get a good idea of what it will be like to learn using your app. If it's just a few characters that they can practice with, then they won't spend enough time with your app to make them feel like they should purchase it over trying another one out.

Very misleading indeed.

But, honestly, I think his shift to smaller games/teams could be for the best. It's hard to guess how much influence he had anymore when "producing" titles. But working on small games might allow his creativity to flourish like it did when he first started.

A couple of years ago, NYC's open data (http://nycopendata.socrata.com/ ) seemed really exciting, but from my brief perusal of the datasets, they appeared limited. It looks like they might have beefed it up since I looked.

Maybe this will finally be the year I get around to entering.

Limiting the height is a good idea. Though it seems like it might look a bit barren with so much white to the left and right of the picture.

What are your thoughts on sites that scroll horizontally? I find that they sometimes look nice, but are often awkward.

Any quick tips for improving the look of my blog(s): http://www.justanotherphotoblog.com/ ? (My other blogs are pretty similar too..)

I don't have a bad eye for web design, but actually creating a good design seems to be beyond me.

I do like the very simple, basic, minimalistic look, but black courier new on a white background isn't exactly beautiful.

Or if you know of any good, free templates along the same vein that would help.

Thanks!

I was in Istanbul a few months ago and the traffic was the craziest I've ever seen. It didn't really seem like anyone paid attention to the traffic signals anyway. I don't see how a new design would help fix that.

I just took his course last semester. Glad I had the opportunity. He was always full of interesting stories.

What is this, pacifist Pacman? I can't eat the ghosts! (And they can't eat me.)

I tried it out last night with a couple of friends. It certainly works fine, quality is good and all. And it was easy enough (aside from installing the plugin for the first time).

The Youtube sharing is an interesting idea, though it very quickly degenerated to rickrolls and nyancats.

Though it's called "hangout" that shows potential for other uses as well - if they could integrate something like shared desktop viewing it would definitely be killer.

I don't really have enough experience with skype video chat to say if this is as good or better, but it does seem promising.

Modern Philosophy now goes to Western Europe rather than Philosophy. And since everything seems to go through that, nothing will reach philosophy anymore.

Some great things come out of 4chan, but they also do some really terrible things. It's sad that they tricked a few people, but it sounds like they didn't do what they had hoped for. It was a really nice gesture by the guy who brought dates for the people were were tricked.

The ones who got trolled were those who were sitting at their computers, watching, alone.

It's adorable :3

Don't have an Atari 400, but wish I had the circuitry know-how to pursue something like this for the Commodore disk drive.

High typing speeds (9001, for example) seem to cause problems.

Reading this gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

I can't imagine trying to teach 3rd graders binary using a standard method - I even have peers in college that struggle with it. Probably because it was just taught to them as something different - this weird language computers use, instead of them developing an intuitive sense for it. But whenever I try to explain it to them, or anyone else, I always try and explain it as "just like decimal, exactly what you already know."

The Socratic method really is much more interesting and captivating for students. For example, Walter Lewin's physics lectures (Which are well worth watching, even if you're not taking a physics class), which I'm currently watching to "supplement" my actual physics class in which the professor stares at the board and rambles.*

*Not to say that his lectures are the Socratic method - that's probably not feasible with a lecture hall of hundreds of students. But the way he teaches makes you feel like you're discovering everything again along with him.

I've used it and it works great. The only problem I remember encountering was getting it to work with a virtualenv, but that was probably just inexperience on my part.