lukedoolittle

I feel like for a lot of us, at its most basic level, software development is truly creative. It's not the activity that people traditionally associate with the term "creative outlet" but for me at least it's akin to combining human emotional experience and music theory to compose a song or a flavor inspiration and the 12 tastes in food to create a dish. Even further as I've moved into a Machine Learning Engineer role the creative aspect needn't even be sensual, like visual or auditory, it could be totally abstract: I find the concept of some of the tensorflow graphs I have created to be beautiful even though they are way too complex to visualize (suck it tensorboard).

I don't know if this changes anything but I think the actual bet is described by the line

>I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe—a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won't even be close. I'll bet on my optimism.

It seems like in the actual terms of the bet Kelly paraphrases Sale. That is how I would read it sans an actual signed legal document. But then again I'm not a lawyer or anyone versed in gambling etiquette and protocol.

Yes, thanks for the clarification. Continuous/background syncing is the difficult task.

I tried to make a demo app to perform very simple HTTP p2p and found this difficult on iOS. When an app is backgrounded you have ~17 seconds to stop execution or the OS will kill any active threads UNLESS the activity is among the Apple permitted exceptions. (Note that there is no iOS SyncThing app). In Android it is possible to use IntentService as a single threaded background HTTP server. It works for the most part but can be a little flakey. I'm not 100% sure how the OpenGarden SDK accomplishes this but I'm interested. My guess is that it makes heavy use of Bluetooth, which is one of the Apple permitted exceptions to the backgrounding rule.

I don't think the mainstream of pragmatic Machine Learning/AI (deep neural networks, reenforcement learning, etc) is really working toward that goal. However there are some who are trying to create a "software simulation of the biological brain", Numenta being one. I think the limiting factor there is current instrumentation for use in neurological study.

Tis already happening. http://www.businessinsider.com/self-driving-cars-already-dec...