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Excellent list! Thank you.

> There are some toxic fields of research, but I don't think this attitude is particularly common in the academia.

Yes it is. Sadly.

gone35on Interview with Marc Andreessen on learning to love the humanities, and RSS

"Empires — fun historical fact: The Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world, yet there was no office. There was no office building. The Roman aristocrats worked out of their homes, and then they went to the Senate, and then [laughs] they went to their country house. There was no office building for administering the Roman Empire."

Is this "fact" correct?

Edit: It turns out utterly not. The Basilicas, for instance, were office buildings for public administration.

Why make up something like this?

gone35on What is a programmable programming language? (2019)

"Paralinguistic symbols as constituency"

You mean constituents? Or operands?

"Paralinguistic"

I think you mean syncategoremata?

"Iconic forms"

"vau calculus"

Interesting. For the interested, see: https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-090110-124904/unr...

gone35on Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

I actually can't think of one example where society has rejected a useful technology.

Nuclear energy, for one.

gone35on Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be fake or spam

"70.23% of @ElonMusk followers are unlikely to be authentic, active users who see his tweets."

Somewhat alarming, if accurate.

gone35on Many software companies are a joke

Don't see how politics or "bickering over the pettiest feature like [...] what colour the chart should be" is what "deliver[ing] maximum business value" is about, as you put it.

gone35on Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

There is (was) Patchwork [1].

[1] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

gone35on A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

(2016?)

Also:

> First wave: Handcrafted knowledge

> Second wave: Statistical learning

> Third wave: Contextual adaptation

I understood clearly enough the first two, but the slides become increasingly ambiguous and fuzzy towards the end; and it seems to me they are mixing up a bunch of not self-evidently related desiderata.

It is not immediate, for instance, that small "generative" models that are easy to interpret necessarily lead to better "abstraction" (whatever that means). And whatever this all has to do with "contextual adaptation" is to me anyone's guess.

Highly alarming (but sadly, from experience, unsurprising) to see such fuzzy position document from such an important funding agency for AI.

gone35on In defense of complicated programming languages

> At a higher level of grouping, we have more trouble. This is the level of DLLs, microservices, and remote APIs. We barely have language for talking about that. We have no word for that level of structure. I sometimes refer to that as the "big object" level. Attempts to formalize that level have led to nightmares such as CORBA, XML schemas, and JSON schemas, and a long history of mostly forgotten interface languages.

Here I would like to think TLA+ would help. But it seems it doesn't either.

gone35on Arctype

(Disclaimer: from an On Deck friend of mine.)

gone35on Will World Government Rot?

P.D.: Related — Dick Feynman on 'experts' and "pseudoscience":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

gone35on Will World Government Rot?

> […] this is lazy, should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.

Or entrepreneurship, or nutrition, or (yelp) underestablished engineering issues too! Carelessly thought leadership should go the way of "statistical significance" / p < 0.05 sophistry of yore.

gone35on U.S. Treasury Data Lab

^This is correct, demonstrably.

Unlike at the micro level, at the macro level your spending is my income.

That alone changes (almost every) received microeconomic intuition.

gone35on JSON Schema bundling formalised

History has not been kind to efforts like these.

gone35on Google executives see cracks in their company’s success

> I helped build up a team- Google Accelerated Sciences- which does basically what I thought Google should be doing all along.

MD?

gone35on Government Finds No Evidence That Aerial Sightings Were Alien Spacecraft

you omitted the rest of the quote:

"[...] but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report."

And, later in the text:

"[...] And while a forthcoming unclassified version, expected to be released to Congress by June 25, will present few other firm conclusions, senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft."

gone35on Government Finds No Evidence That Aerial Sightings Were Alien Spacecraft

Title changed to: "U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either".

gone35on Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

Russian formalists

gone35on Once we can see them, it’s too late

Below [1] Hanson explains some of the details of the argument in length.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjm--7t8Llk&feature=youtu.be

gone35on A Map of Mathematics

> Abstract algebra is basically the study of "number systems".

I don't think that's entirely correct.

gone35on A Map of Mathematics

> "space and quantity"

That's a rather narrow view even of mainstream mathematics IMO.

gone35on Learn Quantum Computation

Quantum algorithms sort of operate on all superposed states at the same time.

This is not entirely correct.

Also, from your linked article:

I will now introduce the Deutsch Oracle algorithm, one of the first examples of a quantum algorithm that is exponentially faster than its classical counterpart on the size of the input.

This is not entirely correct either.

See [1] for an authoritative source.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/scott-aaronson-qu...

gone35on Interesting Research Programs from the 2010s

Had never encountered the field "epistemic topology" before. Highly non-trivial:

On the Solvability of Inductive Problems: A Study in Epistemic Topology

https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07518

gone35on OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

It passes the Turing test.

gone35on Neural Magic raises $15M seed round to accelerate AI inference on CPUs

He says there is this false notion that you need these specialized chips or hardware accelerators to have the necessary resources to run these jobs, but he says it doesn’t have to be that way.

Their ad copy say "2.5x Faster than Volta" and "10x Cheaper than Volta", but using CPUs only. Incredibly impressive, if true.

gone35on The State of Augmented Reality

Wow, thanks. Sobering to see how, in a sense, how little has changed since.

gone35on WeWork's business model has created a new 'financial-stability risk'

Actual remarks by Boston Fed's Rosengren here:

https://www.bostonfed.org/news-and-events/speeches/2019/asse...

gone35on Why doesn't mathematics collapse, though humans often make mistakes in proofs?

Collapses are rare indeed, but they do happen. Cf. the collapse of the Italian School of Algebraic Geometry [1], the cleanup of which took all the efforts of Grothendieck et al.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_ge...

gone35on Mesenchymal Stem Cell Treatment for Ischemic Kidney Disease (2013)

(Note: this is just a "Concise Review" article. Missed the header due to the character limit...)