Always minus a month is still always in this kind of context. Otherwise, I would have also meant that Erdös was also on drugs when he was a baby and during his childhood, and I guess it's easy to deduce from context that wasn't the case. I already knew about the one month anecdote but didn't thought it was relevant for my reply.
Yes, I tested it too and it's very nice! It finds images with differences in color, and even superposed text, etc, just as promised in the video. Amazing, really.
Maybe it calculates some kind of hash on every image, an then it looks for images that are at a distance lower than n to such hash? But I don't know any hashing system for images that could work this way... could anyone explain?
Edit: a fingerprint is mentioned in the video, so I guess there is some kind of hashing system after all.
"On the other hand, a services business might not be ideal for a hyperbrain, since clients naturally care about the work you’re doing for them now, rather than the work you did for other clients in the past."
Probably you're right that services aren't good for "hyperbrains", but I don't think that's the cause. In a services business there is something you build, and that's your reputation. As your reputation grows, your prizes grow too, and also you get to be pickier about the kind of work you choose. So that's the backlog of the services business.
So while you're right that a backlog is useful and needed, it can be derived from the services business too.
This is also very cool: http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes As far as I know Spore is the first game to publish this kind of previous work, and not just the source code (some games published design docs, and a lot of games published postmortems too, but entire working prototypes? I've never seen that).
Impressive. I love this kind of websites (this reminds me to Why's books and that kind of material). Any other sites to recommend in the same kind of style?
Do you really believe that? The implementation requires skills too, and without those skills, you get terrible and buggy code, even if it uses pretty names and if it follows your descriptions more or less.
I like Twitter, but I think Facebook is horrible, a terrible waste of time, it's like LinkedIn for teenagers imo. This comes from a guy that has also stopped using chat tools (excepting for the days I might need them), so please excuse me for being on the very unpopular side.
I only made an account for myself when I saw that I had friends that were having interesting conversations in there. I don't see how having an account for you alone could be useful if you have nobody to talk to (it's like having an msn account if you haven't any useful contacts... twitter is as good as your contacts so beware of adding random people).
How could they tell there were imaginary flashes? It seems like a private experiment, you can't check it. (Maybe there were not expected flashes at all and they saw some anyway?)
What I mean: given enough time, we'd be able to analyze a specific computation (not all real-time computations of such mind). However, our patience, lives and our universe too is finite, so it could set practical limits to our task. Say: decoding X signal would only take me more time than the universe to end, so, that's anyway an impossible task. But we should be able, in principle and with infinite time, to analyze any computation. (Well, we should first set a meaning for "analyze" in this context)
In my opinion, you are doing it wrong. The voting scheme doesn't promote herd mentality, the voting scheme is used to sort the comments on the threads. Now, should you measure yourself by your level of karma? NO. The smartest guys here don't have the greatest karma necessarily, so you shouldn't care either. Say what you have to say, and don't mind the score you are given because of it. Is that being cynical? No: because you'll see that your comments with the biggest score will often be trivial or simply wrong, so if you'd started following the score you'd start posting trivial and wrong stuff. Don't do that. Just say what you have to say, learn with us, teach us, and that's it.
Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time?
That's correct. I'm sure flies and dogs are Turing machines as much as we are (if we are), yet we are considered to be much more intelligent beings than both of them. A computer capable of a level of intelligence as big to us, as we are to a dog, would be pretty impressive. But I think he's not talking about that, as he says: The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs, but if the singularity mind was bigger than us, but of the same nature, we would be able to compute it with pencil and paper, or in a computer, and to analyze it to see how it works (very slowly, as a Turing machine).
I liked this description of our current world: I see a world that really did change dramatically over the last century, but where progress on many fronts (like transportation and energy) seems to have slowed down rather than sped up; a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans, and supercharging its climate; a world where technology is often powerless to solve the most basic problems, millions continue to die for trivial reasons, and democracy isn’t even clearly winning out over despotism; a world that finally has a communications network with a decent search engine but that still hasn’t emerged from the tribalism and ignorance of the Pleistocene. We are a world in great deficit excepting for: a) Internet, b) Google. Wow!
I don't think this is entirely right. If I'm doing something wrong, and someone tells that to me, that's useful. Now I know I'm doing that wrong, and that I only have to find out a different way of doing that.
GEB as a classic of computer science? Why? It's imaginative, right, but it lacks the rigor to be a classic. Better to read about recursion, formal systems, lambda calculus, undecidability, complexity theory, etc from some math text... at least I have found it to be a lot more interesting and revealing.
I disagree with such opposing view. 25 libraries would be a nightmare to get in just the right version, and specifically compiling a program with many libraries that aren't already compiled in Windows is usually a nightmare (at least with VC++, which I guess is what these guys are using together with Scons?), to compile the software. The idea that Chrome would automatically update in case one of such libraries changed, is probably not very convenient either as such updates could also break the code (because of changes in the interfaces for example, or in the behavior of libraries... while it's not very probable for each library, it becomes quite probable when you have 20+ libraries).
Game-related services are a different subject btw. Developing games for advertising, doing consulting for game dev companies, etc, is a much more safer bet than making game-based products. However, the game industry doesn't pay as much as other industries, whatever you do in there (at least that was my experience).