myaso

I personally find a lot of the material about cognitive biases hard to swallow -- I was forcing myself really hard when I read Kahneman's book. There were some good points but while reading it something just seemed off in a way similar to trying to break down the world into a rigid dichotomy -- likes "is the a ok approximate anwser?" "Yes" "Would I use it?" "Possibly with great skeptism and appropriate weight given the context, but likely not"

Great, these who want to build these things will simply hire people who don't subscribe to this oath ... And now the organization will be populated by a whole tribe of people who have no qualms about doing this -- does that sound like something that will make things better?

Aside: the book looked interesting. Skimmed it, beautiful typesetting, not gratuitously mathematical, looked readable -- I may be wrong, but it's just a exercise of adding awareness of it's existence to me.

You beat me to it by a day! And here I thought I was being clever. It's amazing how Xerox PARC's lineage can probably be traced to this essay, that's not the only interesting thing about it :)

Vannevar Bush's writings are going on my reading list this year and ironically so are Markus Wolf's.

Smartphones are much harder to lock down than a laptop. I don't know about the iPhone but Android makes it a pain in the ass -- don't suggest stuff I've looked very hard already, some things you could do are simply impractical.

There is probably a lack of executive tlc to go around for all their stuff. I don't get it either, they break things that work already -- I simply cannot trust anything they put out that isn't search/Android/Google AI stuff anymore. Wasn't there some heuristic that a large company can only have 3 strategic priorities? Guess these 3 are it.

He got crucified because he didn't make anybody laugh -- now he will be paraded around as a poster boy for the alt-right or w/e. Aren't autistic traits highly prelevant in programmers? Isn't it also true that those traits will show up much more often in men compared to women -- a token factoid curtesy of wikipedia. Also anecdotally, how many male devs do I know that started hacking at 13 -- a lot. How many women? Personally none, but I know colah from Google Brain is one example, and a rather extreme data point too -- at the extreme end of the scale it's irrelevant anyways, a successful female comp sci prof or a female researcher will be picked. Unless there is some extremely good reason like Google drained all the capable men already out of the ecosystem there doesn't seem to be rational reason to explicitly optimize their hiring pipeline for the wrong demographic -- maybe they don't optimize it like that, but a lot of people have the perception that they do which will get you the same result in the end.

Update: one moment this gets up voted and the next moment it gets down voted and this repeats, is anybody willing to actually argue? Call my bs, I have thick skin.

Pay walled, but I don't even need to read the article. If you have a working proposal for consuming information faster than my eyes and ears can do it and also a working proposal for controlling a computer faster than I can do it with a keyboard; with the constraint that the method that does this doesn't kill me immediately or eventually, then you have my attention. Until that day happens, I do not care and I will focus my time and attention on things that are actually possible.

Just for parents? Why not just give all users the ability to block certain usage patterns and access to applications -- kinda like the StayFocusd plugin for Chrome. Hell, charge a monthly fee to access the web interface to manage it; you get a mechanism to induce friction and you get a subscription business -- I would pay for this shit since I value my attention more than someone who you pick off the street. How does 300$ a year sound? like weight watchers for attention (we know that model works already). You get a nice upsell on an already expensive device. Maybe this will be a nice way to maintain profits given that people aren't replacing their devices as often anymore, keep trying the stunt of billing incremental features as revolutionary and people will stop believing you.

Depends on the company, maybe some methods seem primitive by our standards but they can be extremely effective nonetheless. I strongly suspect a lot of it unnecessary, I've seen a VC funded startup tackle the same problem that someone solved with a mailing list. Software expertise seems to be the most expensive generic skill set that you can hire for anywhere today -- even if you hire the people they still might be crippled by having to work with legacy infrastructure; I've seen a live SCO Unix server not too long ago.

This is really interesting. Given how open most development tools are and the fact that users will constantly generate data makes them a natural environment for deep learning based productivity plugins. But we can't have nice things :( -- also this doesn't sound like a great way to make money.

You use a wiki in a different way than a journal -- journal entries you write once and maybe read again. You can iteratively prune and refine a wiki over time.

I went through something similar. I started keeping a journal. Also start a personal wiki, I use vimwiki and it's the best habit I ever developed -- it really helps to organize your thinking, you will also understand yourself better. Don't take a sabbatical unless you have an interest that consumes you, given the state your in you won't get anything done -- at best it will let you wander into something you decide on and at worst it will be a temporary escape.

It really depends. For learning and using ML/DL it hasn't helped me much, the bottleneck is stats and linear algebra for that field. Even if it helps, is it the most valuable and broadly useful tool you can add to your current toolkit as of right now? Likely not. Learning to write proofs helped in other ways, the content wasn't actually terribly important.

Definitely, Griffith's Electrodynamics was a lot of fun. Still fondly recall working through the problems.

Ugh. Don't do that. The water is disgusting in Ontario. There are some pretty strong guidelines regarding eating fish from there too. Heard stories from people who need to test it and filter it for injectables. It's not out in the wilderness, but it's still a good idea to just avoid it. So you drank one bottle that's different from sustained consumption.

You need a certain fraction of people willing to just do the required work without complaining -- there is only so much schlep a person can tolerate; certain factors like marriage, children, a mortgage, sick parents, and sense of duty can raise the amount someone can handle. There probably aren't enough slots internally to accommodate the others. Compliance is a very useful trait for employees to have, obviously it falls on a spectrum.

Sorry, must of given off the wrong impression. I'm quite happy with FP in general, I'm just aware it is possible to write some pretty horrendous things. But yeah you are completely right about (4), at some point it doesn't seem like overkill anymore.

It wasn't just the 90s, sometime after like the late 2000s meeting people online organically became hard. I guess everyone who wanted to could just go on FB now. It's like everyone got put into their own little box. Discord would have been awesome if I was younger.

But yeah. Talking, chatting, reading, and running. Marathon video game binges with old friends because we have less and less in common now. Everything helps.

Does the code actually work? Wouldn't you need to create a instance within meta_dec and return the result of the __call__ method. See at first glance I won't think it would work if I didn't know __call__ is a magic method in python. I don't think I'm being overly picky but I found the previous example much easier to read -- since it's a pattern I defaulted to myself before across several different languages. Mixing classes and FP like that doesn't resonate well with me tbh, but yeah you could do it ... but should you?

So just a function that returns a closure? It can be a real pain to read code like this if it's overdone -- I really would need to trust somebody to let them go meta at their discretion.

Thanks for the link. Found some data: https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... -- and also found this gem http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/b... This looks more like a symptom unique to specific countries, when you consider accuracy of data and the penalty for trafficking by jurisdictions.

The thing that I don't get about this opioid crisis is I keep hearing about it but I have never really seen the corresponding human misery being captured in photography or film -- I see and hear words but I can't gauge the magnitude of the problem. Is this mainly prescription opiates? That's an issue with with the ethics of medical professionals more than anything else -- if you have a low threshold to prescribe this shit what the hell bdo you expect?

Update: found a nice heat map from NY Times; still the issue is there are no absolute numbers or the table that shows how the color gradient in the heat map progresses -- I get tall tales of year over year percentage increases but no absolute numbers to reference against. Is it really that hard to make a decent chart/graphic for this for a org like NYT?

Again I agree ... it is nice to know the option exists but the value of this option isn't static at every point in time or every context -- the mere existence of it creates a certain level of bullshit that needs to be put up with.

I think Python would be the best choice for an absolute beginner, I almost always recommend it when I'm asked what to start with -- it's objectively more pleasant to use than js. The thing about js is, you can get your hands dirty actually making some fairly interesting things quickly, it's just that things are much messier overall.

Both, and yes I quite disagree with you in some fundamental way. They have a specific niche while being severely over hyped.

Blockchains solve one piece of a puzzle I can trust the transaction to go through but I can't trust the ecosystem that it operates in -- I'll leave the definition of trust purposely ambiguous. Despite all their flaws the systems already in place are designed with the ideal to prevent anti-social malfeasance. No sane business will adopt a blockchain for a problem that already can be solved using cheaper methods -- you don't need to embed certain controls in technology, you can simply catch stuff using manual human powered processes at a much lower cost which are much more flexible than a program. Cryptocurrencies make it easy to pay any address I know exists and they also let someone purchase illegal goods easily.

Not that I'm a manager but I enjoyed High Output Management by Andy Grove. It's short and sticks to KISS, I don't really subscribe to the belief that dealing with people is something you can learn from books -- The Art of War won't kindle a non existent fire, instead it amplifies something innate. A lot of methodology seems overly rigid and stiff to be useful for anything but sounding good in theory and failing in practice.

Naw. Take a look at the percentage of GDP the US spent on the military -- 3.3% according to wikipedia, higher than average overall but less than average if you look at other countries that are actively using their militaries -- not necessarily correct unless the mechanics of the tax system are known but it is a vastly closer approximation than what your comment implied.

Life is not a need or a natural right. Nature can continue to grind on regardless of what you think. It seems you think that having other people enforce a system that offers you guarantees is something you are automatically entitled to having -- how much security you get is dependent upon the resources of the larger group, just like all other rights.

To get AI you have an interface problem you need to solve since reality is a bitch to parse; this is just the start, what about the formulation of goals? How would you even make that in code? You would need to start with a certain kind of data that was extracted by the sensors but how will you ever know you have the correct set? You have two problems to solve simultaneously getting the right data and building the right system on top of it -- this core data when done in reality is not the same core data that would make this possible in a simulation and the system on top while maybe having the same fundamental form is also very likely different. Makings intelligent agents in a simulation is not the same as making intelligent agents arbitrarily useful in the real world, granted a simulation is a good means to explore techniques -- in a simulation I control the sensory apparatus of the agent perfectly. So I think the lesson is you either build systems from which it is easy to stream data and configure programmatically or deal with the fact that this is likely impossible without simulating a universe to high fidelity. Deep Learning is extremely useful as it is, not the same as cryptocurrencies which are useful but this usefulness will never be properly realized due to human nature -- right now their primary purpose seems to be to satiate greed and humans with poor impulse control while promising a lot of outlandish things.