jimduk

Gerald Edelman wrote on this back in the 80s and 90s. To massively oversimplify The books Neural Darwinism and The Remembered Present posited a) how neural action sequences originally for e.g. ballistic throwing, could be repurposed for linear language production and b) How consciousness needed to be a semi-stable chaotic attractor so that different avenues of thought could be pursued but that there was still coherency. Exciting that some of this may have been on the right track

The complex systems people used to discuss the problem of agents with internal models making models of other agents [1].

Similarly biologists are interested in how a living thing 'organises itself' in the world, maintains its structure and how its sensing and action is coupled to the environment[2].

This sounds like a similar approach, however fuzzy. Isn't it just saying 'can we look for principles that define how living creatures should organise the effort (energy/information) it makes sense to put into "recognising/ predicting/ acting in / being in" the world?'

Makes sense there could be some shared mechanisms, though I'd personally be surprised if they are universal, as differing life-forms seem suited for differing levels of environmental change. This is something lots of people have looked at (it's fun), and agree the Wired article doesn't give a clear answer.

1. Can't recall the paper, but think it was Doyne Farmer ( or Chris Langton?) arguing that if your agent had complexity N, then you should spend sqrt(N) complexity modelling another agent

2. e.g. Maturana & Varela, summary of autopoeisis here http://supergoodtech.com/tomquick/phd/autopoiesis.html but I'm sure lots of other biologists have good theories

Good point, but it's also the case they forget being upset quickly. My father-in-law had dementia, and as he progressed I found it useful (for me) to interact with him as if he was like an X yr old child (without a medium/long term memory). e.g. If X was 6-8 we would talk about family, have a walk, point things out, express preferences, tell stories. If X was 3-4 we would talk about people and things in the room, discuss food, check he was comfortable, smile and be upbeat.

I had much better time with him like this, than seeing other families who were trying to be 'grown up' and have serious conversations. YMMV. Dementia is awful.

Second is correct. 20 shillings in the pound so 12 and sixpence is 5/8 of a pound

People build tools for use. Software projects are an example of this. A lens I find helpful is to view a software project as a "process (or game) of transforming shared and individual understanding (or belief), into a tool or artefact". The project falls short if the understanding is not valid or the tool is poorly built or if the tool doesn't encapsulate the understanding or if circumstances change and the tool becomes less useful.

Transferring valid understanding into the final artefact is a key constraint in many projects (reading Goldratt and thinking of this transfer of understanding as a constraint was helpful for me)

There are many ways to fail. Some of the traditional ways to succeed are

i) rely on an individual who really understands the desired tool, and who has the authority and skill to communicate and be the final arbiter (including sometimes to write it all themselves). Sometimes this can be also done by a small group.

ii) write a really clear, well-written, very hard to misinterpret document and get professionals to develop and test this system (before the document goes significantly out of date)

iii) Run an agile process where the business can describe what they want in small pieces that can be delivered so quickly that little understanding is lost

Obviously what works is massive contextual, depending on the domain, funding, resource reqts etc. (Glen Alleman is good on this)

So I would argue 'good software tools for requirements' are critically dependent on your approach for how you are going to turn 'understanding' into a 'system', and you don't want to worry too much about them until you are happy with your approach. At that point you can start building your 'meta-tools'.

What have you learnt in the last year and how did that come about? Dig down to see the situation or person or self-motivation that lead to this? Variations can include 'what has the team learnt?'

This is useful at an individual level for your expectations, and it's a company flag if people respond negatively.

Agreed, spent time last year on a project fusing lidar and rotating LWIR (thermal) with some smart people and calibration took significant effort, mechanically, in electronic timing, and in algorithmic fusing. This looks like a nice step forward.

I used to work for a while as a management consultant, and, in my personal experience, would rephrase the above as "a subset of the smart, engaged workers in a company, can often tell you 80%, of the main problems in week 1, which makes you wonder why the CEOs ( who are smart) hire you to address those problems, as well as the trickier 20%

African books i liked, though more anecdotal and transition-based, all short

i) Ryszard Kapuściński, both the The Emperor and the Soccer War ( half of this is about Africa, other half is South/Central America)

ii) Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart - fiction but feels 'truthy'

  - LinkedIn
  - Skype
  - Lies around Windows 10 semi-forced upgrade
  - Nokia
  - The hell that is Office365
  - Vermeer
  - Groove
  - Rare
  - Visio
  - Hotmail
  - FASA
  - Firefly

I don't mind their strategy from a business perspective, but from a human perspective I mind they have crushed the goodness out of so many companies they have acquired. It's analogous to the chinese cultural revolution, or if some 3rd rate florentine artist got to buy out Botticelli et al. just as they got started. I know this is not only Microsoft (Cisco, Google et al.) but MS are not innocent and don't deserve to have their slate wiped clean (yet)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Isn't this an ethics problem ? And then isn't the question whether this contract as reported is fundamentally unethical, or at least considered to be unethical by the majority of the current UK populace. I would argue the answers to these questions are 'yes' and 'yes'. Just because previously newspapers have behaved unethically, doesn't change the matter. Newspapers often preach from the high moral ground/ 'courageously representing the views of the people' and the Standard is no exception.

If the Evening Standard wanted to change what it called itself to e.g. a 'hand-out' that may be ok, but if it is claiming to be a newspaper written by journalists then this is not. I am not a journalist, but don't journalism ethics include the concepts of truthfulness, accountability, openness and independence amongst others.

Thanks for the pointer - I've just skimmed the last 2 chapters and looks like a good book but don't think it solves my specific problem (just to give more context, when I said amateur I'm doing this for fun not money, but have previously built an image processing pipeline from raw sensor output and I get the basics of wavelets, Fourier etc )

My specific question is "If I am matching a RAW stereo block (say 8x8 or 16x16 block), for sub-pixel resolution matching from two similar cameras, why (if at all) is it better to use DCT/Fourier matching e.g. matlab normxcorr2 or the elphel guys https://blog.elphel.com/2018/01/complex-lapped-transform-bay... , rather than try to match in the spatial domain (linear algebra). On writing this I suppose I better look at the H.264 and HEVC algos and see if they work in the frequency or spatial domain when they are looking at sub-pixel matches.

I'm doing some amateur work on sub pixel matching at the block-level for stereo, currently using cheap APS-C prime lens commercial cameras ( Ricoh GR) and my background is maths not cameras, but what I've observed (all in RAW) is

a) Real world scenes often go below the Nyquist limit ( e.g pattern from a brick wall at sufficient distance)

b)In a camera without a low-pass filter (e.g. the Ricoh GR) in practice you don't see Moire but you can definitely generate it artificially off real world objects

c) The Point Spread function seems quite important (e.g a 1-pixel scene feature for the GR will have half the effect on the sensor as a 2-pixel function because of the point spread)

d) I'm a bit confused as why Fourier/ DCT all work as well as they do, as the Nyquist assumption for a modern digital camera seems incorrect, but on the whole sub-pixel matching in a Fourier space (while Nyquist assumption is not true) seems roughly on par with matching in the spatial domain - I would love to see something that explains why this is so

Happy to discuss this more as I am still learning

My view would to rephrase the hypothesis as "the quality of 'Britain's public intellectual debate' has declined".

This seems true in parts, a friend became intrigued by the quality of debate for Britain's membership of the EEC in 1975 vs. Brexit. Two examples for 1975 are ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2jUYryRYII and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zBFh6bpcMo) and these certainly seem of higher quality.

One hypothesis (similar to Curtis above) was that there were two energised generations, post WW2 and 1960s, who believed that public debate and ideas could change things, and a variety of new-ish institutions and technologies (BBC, TV) could enable that change. They were partially successful, but the energy and enthusiasm dissipated over time.

Another argument is that Britain is reasonably anti the public intellectual (e.g. unlike the French but much better than the US), apart from during certain times of fairly major change (Royal Society/Glorious Revolution; Scottish Enlightenment; post WW2 settlement etc.) and we are going back to our dormant state.

A third may be that the nature of 'public' has changed, and the debate is going on, but not in media forms which stifle and trivialise it (Less optimistic here, the Greens tried hard to change public debate, some say Momentum, certainly we are quite good at up-market PR, brand design and marketing, all of which suck the energy/deflect from certain debates)

In my experience, in private the quality of debate isn't too bad, though a touch cynical

On the sadder side, this http://www.dewsburyreporter.co.uk/news/tragic-story-behind-r... is a tapestry which records a ladies nine children who died in infancy between 1855 and 1871. Seen it and it is affecting.

We built a consumer product like this back in 2013 - Autographer. The hard bits were i) battery life, ii) taking good pictures when moving, iii) having a socially acceptable & nicely designed product that points in the right direction, iv) connectivity, v) wide FOV camera module vi) How to subselect & create the best picture/video experiences (intelligence & creativity) vii) Who/when/what it was really for.

In 2017 v) is solved, i)/ii)/iv) are easier, google should be able to do vi) as well as anyone, let's see about vii). Anyway good luck to them and I'll be buying one.

I agree with your sentiment, but historically your Grand-x father potentially got sold out in the Highland Clearances by his clan leader and then emigrated to Canada/US. This made way for sheep (lots of Scotland is still relatively underpopulated) and the head of the clan probably blew the money on a town-house in London.

People have roots, but they often get pulled out.

See John Prebble - the Highland Clearances 1963 - ISBN-13: 978-0140028379 "‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.

When you do 5.) show them appreciation - buy them a nice meal as they explain things to you - it's a nice thing to do, a small price to pay, assuming it's appropriate

Overview | Junior Developer | South London, UK | FULL-TIME, ONSITE, must be eligible to work in the UK, no equity, London engineering level salary, http://overview.co.uk

Join a small team using Thermal imaging, LIDAR, high-end point/tilt/zoom video to develop next generation surveillance cameras.

You enjoy programming, are strong at maths/physics/engineering, learn quickly and can communicate clearly. With us you can work on video, thermal imaging, motor control, electronics and mechanics, and the whole extended image pipeline from the principles of imaging up to high level deep learning models of behaviour.

Programming is primarily in C/C++ plus potentially CUDA/Python. Environments will be Windows/Linux with a likely transition to embedded. Work will vary from the drudgy (getting 3rd party motor control boards to work) to the speculative (how well do CNNs work on Thermal imaging at range) to the necessary (data capture expeditions).

You must be ok with surveillance/ defence-related work.

Overview is a CCTV manufacturing SME with a strong engineering & research culture.

If interested, please send an email to recruitment@overview.co.uk . The email must contain a single paragraph saying why you think you fit this role, plus CV. Links to code are always good.

NO AGENCIES PLEASE.

Application process is email->phone interview->on-site interview (maybe x2). Salary is engineering level, so reasonable but lower than City/Fully backed start-up/BigTechCo.

In 2010, before this war, the BBC produced a 5-part documentary series called "Syrian School" -doing a fly-on-the-wall in four schools in Damascus. I only saw half of it, but looking back it is heart breaking. The short answer is, day-to-day life in a Syrian school was very similar and recognisable to e.g. the UK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUDxznlkm6Y

I agree with your points, when composing I wrote "left (communist/socialist)" but edited for brevity, which was a mistake. I was trying to compare political traditions with different emphases on 'greater good for the many' vs 'individual rights'.

> ... and all the other checks and balances of a healthy democracy

Is there anything new we should asking for here ? Data disclosure/provenance laws ( a bit like supply chain traceability), Rights of appeal vs algorithm etc ? Unfortunately it seems like the EU was one of the more progressive forces here for the UK

One irony is that these predictive/manipulative systems built on mass data and psychology are (currently) being used by the 'right' rather than the 'left', though they fit better philosophically with the latter.

Does anyone know of any work on the politics of trust/agency in the information/ algorithm age ? How does a normal democratic person self educate in this world without falling back to a siege mentality/ trust in a small cell, or proceeding in a 'happy-go-lucky', 'life is short' manner.

My uneducated guess is this is not that different from some periods of history (Russia, Communist Europe, French Terror, US west expansion?, Ethiopia?), but it feels different from 1960s-90s western Europe (though maybe not - qn raised by samsonradu in this thread).

Another way of putting the problem is as an arms race between vested interests with advanced predictive/ manipulative systems and the general populace. This is probably not new - does it balance out or does it get more concentrated ?

Thoughts on the final 'Offer' stage. If it's your startup, be brutally honest with your first hires. Put yourself in their shoes when you make the offer. Explain it like you would explain it to yourself.

- Tell them, unprompted, key difficulties that may lie ahead (in an upbeat manner)

- Sell them on the goal, but don't sell them that they are the right person - that's their choice

- Do not make promises you can't keep. Let me repeat this. Do not make promises you can't keep

The reason for doing the above is a) You will have tough times together - this is your team - you must start well b) If they can't handle these conversations you probably don't want them c) You're human, behave well if you can

Context disclaimer - this is from a London, UK perspective while hiring senior people. YMMV.

Fine - let's go for a walk together, build a fire, cook and chat and see what we have in common - It would be interesting. This is why TV and film like Humans and Bladerunner and I, Robot and Arrival and books like Ancillary Justice are fun - how much would we understand each other? how would it be different from interacting with a human?

I think the core argument against is the same as it was in 1990 (Dreyfus, Heidegger) - basically AI can solve problems in micro-worlds (chess then, Go now; blocks worlds then image annotation now), but it's not clear these micro-worlds can be fused together, unless they are embodied in an entity who lives in the world. The current deep learning & robotics work is exciting and promising, but it's still a long way from an embodied general intelligence. So - progress might hit the same wall - we can build better subsystems , but not the whole system

This becomes an interesting problem. What is the rational approach for a democratically smaller group which has the majority of future earning potential and is better educated ? (this holds for both the young and also for London). Do you leave? Do you back out of wider society and opt for minimal regulation and keep to your own sub groups? Do you grin and bear it as an obligation? You can wait - but the waiting period risks your current advantages.

Thanks - updated

Some Hintjens' quotes -

i) "One tactic I used was to take the cult techniques and reverse them"

ii) "We create culture by sharing" (extends to a successful project being a culture, a share-alike licence, and a name/domain which of course can be forked)

There are many others - his writing introduced me to Conway's law (was b) - "A software system mimics the structure of the organization that produces it ") - I've only read part of his work, time well spent and good to discuss with programmers and non-programmers - he made me think

OK, so here are my barriers (from painful experience)

a) Need to run a very multidisciplinary culture - electronics, product design,brand, marketing, software, firmware, sourcing, manufacturing, dfm, test, compliance, distribution,returns, cust service etc.

b) Need to synchronise the rhythms of delivery of these different disciplines (no agile process for hard-tooling molds)

c) Need a defensible business model eg some software/ service/ brand component so you don't just get copied

d) You need capital for your supply chain and partners. Volume matters, sometimes you can't even get to the table without volume purchasing. NB you need capital for your first 2 products.

e) The competition is really good (Apple,Sony etc.) The margins are small. The business model is much worse than software or services. Many hardware companies make their money on related services (phones, consoles, printers) so customers don't realise what a 'fair' price is for a hardware item.

Haven't used it but this might help - mentioned on the darknet discussion group - Yolo v3 on Tensorflow - predictions only https://github.com/gliese581gg/YOLO_tensorflow