Yup, we're aware of and working on the orientation issue! Thanks for trying it!
2,464 karma · joined July 25, 2010
https://tali.link
https://twitter.com/taliesinb
The function in the Wolfram Language is called ImageIdentify (obviously): http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ImageIdentify.html
A blogpost from Stephen Wolfram about this site and related topics: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/05/wolfram-language-arti...
The idea is that depression could be a feedback loop in which negative life events cause the brain to become chronically flooded by stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine.
These are pro-inflammatory factors whose chronic presence promote run-away inflammatory responses which kill glial cells, decrease neuroplasticity, retard neurogenesis, and also contribute to a whole constellation of other health problems like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
What closes the feedback loop is that this inflammation-mediated form of brain damage, particularly in the hippocampus and amygdala, directly compromise a person's cognitive ability to deal with life stressors constructively. The ability to process emotion, fear, and memory degrade.
Speaking a bit poetically, you could say that a severely depressed brain is one that has rewired itself to be a stress-processing circuit.
SSRIs no doubt work for some people, and the modern thinking is that they might be promoting neurogenesis through upregulating BDNF and other growth factors; there are multiple lines of evidence, one fun one is the fact that the maturation time of new neurons roughly matches the time it takes for SSRIs to start affecting depression (3-6 weeks).
Exercise also works, seemingly about as well as SSRIs for many people with moderate depression (Googling will provide examples of studies from the last few couple decades to that affect). I haven't read much about this but I would imagine that the metabolic and cellular stresses of a bout of heavy exercise (in which millions of cells die) promotes the production of growth factors all over the body, including in the brain.
Not yet, of course, because it hasn't been released, but Jonathan Blow's Jai language offers transparent switching between AOS and SOA, as well as many other features that make it easy to explore the 'optimization space' of a program manually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHqFrNyLlpA
(for those who don't know, Jonathan Blow was the creator of Braid)
... or if you're implementing safe abstractions on top of data structures or synchronization protocols that the type system cannot automatically infer to be safe.
Of course that is going to be a smallish subset of Rust programmers that gets smaller with time as the standard library fills out, but an important one!
For those who aren't as familiar with Rust, the std::sync [0] module can be a fun way to cut your teeth.
For example, here's the implementation of Mutex.lock [1]:
pub fn lock(&self) -> LockResult<MutexGuard<T>> {
unsafe { self.inner.lock.lock() }
MutexGuard::new(&*self.inner, &self.data)
}
In fact, how could it be otherwise? Rust prevents there ever being more than one &mut to something, so if the signature of Mutex::lock was "&mut self", there could only ever be one usable ref to the Mutex! That would be pointless, of course -- multiple threads need to have references to the mutex.
We're still safe, though, because the "mut-aliasing" that Rust normally prevents via the borrow checker at compile time is being replaced with a run-time mechanism that achieves the same thing via the Mutex and the MutexGuard [2].
[0] http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/index.html
[1] http://doc.rust-lang.org/src/std/sync/mutex.rs.html#196-211
[2] Well, strictly speaking a RwLock is a closer runtime approximation to the borrow checker's rules, because it allows multiple simultaneous readers: http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.RwLock.html
* "The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy " -- about his book, a nice narrative of the last 100 years of the political economy -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEUWxNifJJ8
* Richard D. Wolf's Global Capitalism update featuring Varoufakis -- Richard D. Wolf is always fun to watch, he looks like a Marxist version of Homeland's Saul Berenson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc-iYzniEXM
* "Confessions of an Errant Marxist" -- sort of Varoufakis's origin story -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3uNIgDmqwI
* Bizarre BBC Newsnight interview with Varoufakis -- where you can see the BBC's idealogical function leaking through -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVpWOk7vu18
It's evident from watching these that he is almost without exception the smartest person in every room he's in. And unlike most other economists, he is actually, you know, alive.
Also, the obligatory Pettis articles that should be read by everyone who wishes to form an opinion about Greece's current position:
* http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/syriza-and-the-french-indemn...
* http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/when-do-we-decide-that-europ...
And to encourage some cynanism about the neoliberal wisdoms, here's a contrarian economist called Ha-Joon Chang:
* "23 Things they don't tell you about about Capitalism" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whVf5tuVbus
And then of course at the end of the rainbow there is David Harvey:
* "The 17 Contradictions of Capitalism", LSE -- https://youtu.be/AULJlwoI3TI
We also recently had a spirited HN thread about Greece that had some good stuff in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9314000
But I don't want my descriptions to look like code!
Ideal for this example would be a table where the first column is formatted as code, and the second column as text.
Mac OS X has a pretty nice set of DTrace scripts built in: http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scr...
The ones I use the most:
* iosnoop: see all disk I/O. especially useful to find disk-chatty/poll-y apps.
* execsnoop: see new processes being spawned.
* opensnoop: see file opens. especially useful for failed file opens that break an app.
* dtruss: see all system calls. get access to the entire OS interaction history of an process (or app).
* errinfo: trace failing system calls. where there is smoke...
* iotop -- who is using disk
There is just a crazy, crazy list of things available, built-in:
man -k dtrace
Oh, interesting.
Funny coincidence: I actually met davidad once, when I first starting out at my job. I think because of his asynchronous logic automata. We somehow ended up discussing busy beaver Turing machines over ice cream†.
† Toscanini's near MIT, fantastic ice cream.
For example, the prototypical idea of swapping out Git's disk-trie content-addressed object store for an actual DHT to get immutable distributed file system must have occurred to a lot of people when they first learned about Git's internals.
I don't know about @jbenet's particular journey to these ideas, but I suspect Rich Hickey deserves a lot of credit for using Clojure (and his fun, smart talks) to popularize immutability and name/value separation for a new generation of programmers. Even just ambiently.
That's certainly how I started realizing the power of that paradigm, even though I was already using it for my day job! Especially when I then saw it used building Datomic, which of course leverages immutability to totally refactor the traditional database architecture from client/server into self-serve-client/server/transactor in a really interesting way.
Also, with Clojure's HAMTs, you've got hash trees and cheap immutable update, and that again primes you to read about (or reinvent) Merkle trees. So I doubt nearly as many people would know about such neat CS things without Clojure.
Actually, Bitcoin is also a really obvious way these ideas would become more widespread, though I don't know how many people really go through the trouble of understanding the blockchain mechanism.
And Linus, of course, for Git. Git internal design is really nice and everyone should dip in at some point in their career!
We should give Ralph Merkle a Turing award -- that single idea unlocks so much. Except we shouldn't because he patented Merkle Trees, apparently.
Without debt forgiveness or some kind of GDP-linked scheme, they will slide even further into debt over the next 5 years.
An analogous thing happened multiple times in Africa, too: kleptocrats took out wopping IMF loans for impractical infrastructure projects, stole most of the money, the infrastructure rots, and then over the next few decades the country would end up paying 3 or 4 times the original principal back to the rich Western creditors, having gained nothing, and often having to engage in those euphemistic "structural reforms" that actually end up killing people (you know, if your mosquito net budget goes to loan repayments instead, children die of malaria).
The situation with Greece is very close. The contrast between debtor and creditor is not as stark, but the dynamics are the same.
So already the popular notion that hard-working Germans tax-payers are actually paying for those lazy, feckless Greeks is wrong. It also has nasty racist and fascist undertones, but let's put that aside.
Furthermore, it gets the causality backwards: the labor rollbacks and public cuts inflicted on German workers created the surplus that German banks speculatively invested in dubious Greek enterprises and Spanish construction projects in the 2000s.
Broadly, through the 2000s, Germany embraced neoliberalism, labour got squeezed, profits shot up, and a surplus accumulated. That surplus then needed a place to invest.
Those investments went to, among other dubious places, the (famously) fiscally irresponsible Greek government and corrupt Greek enterprises.
But investment isn't aid, of course. There's no gift. German banks were betting on a return when they loaded Greece and other countries up with debt. Of course a creditor nation also enjoys many political privileges over its debtors, so German politicians were happy, too.
Better yet, that same capital flow was being recycled back into German manufacturing by inflating demand for German exports from those countries! Living beyond their means often meant buying German goods! A giant circulation machine had formed that helped the Germany economy nearly double in 10 years.
In 2008, the slow slide of Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. into the status of 'debtor nations' was brought to a halt by the liquidity crisis. Everyone stopped fantasizing about endless debt-fueled growth. Germany banks and the ECB became more cautious. The circulation halted, and the Greek, Spanish, Italian economies, which distorted by malinvestment and terrible bubbles, collapsed.
Now we see the vulturism of austerity. You know, at one point in 2012 Germany actually proposed replacing the Greek budget and tax functions wholesale -- what else of a country's polity is left? That's economic occupation.
So, to sum up, we have the perverse situation where the banks which caused the crisis are being bailed out by the citizens of a country whose economy was wrecked by the same capital flows the banks mishandled! The Germans citizens aren't bailing out the Greeks citizens. The Greek citizens are bailing out the German banks that lent money to corrupt Greek politicians, by endlessly renewing all that toxic debt that rightly should be written off.
Of course, this should sound familiar, because it happened first in the US in 2008. Again, banks won, ordinary people paid dearly.
Beware the narrative about Germans paying for Greek mistakes. It's wrong, quite disgustingly wrong, and the truth is almost the exact opposite.
That would be basically be war, but fought with economic weapons. I like to think that Europe is not at that stage yet (and hopefully never will be).
For Greece? Greece will recover, and it's hard to do worse than it is currently doing. And as others say, a floating currency will help correct the imbalance of an exporter like Germany dominating the EU.
And bizarrely, I suspect investment will be quick to return if Greece is seen as being out from under its cloud. Investors seem to care less about previous behavior than about future prospects.
> It's a really bad strategy in that it doesn't prepare the Greek people for anything bad happening.
No... Germany stands to lose the most, because the likely eventual outcome is the collapse of the entire monetary union, and the wide markets that Germany has enjoyed.
I even saw one mainstream newspaper use the phrase "economic aid" when referring to the loans given to Greece to service their existing debt!
much the same perversion as the 2008 bailouts going to predatory lenders instead of bankrupt US homeowners
You've got it completely backwards: Greece is the equivalent of a person who desperately needs to declare bankruptcy, but is prevented by his creditors from doing so. Instead he is forced to borrow ever more money to pay off his old debts.
Eventually, no-one can pretend this is working anymore, so the creditor suggests he sell his house, his car, all his work implements. And if we take the analogy back a thousand years, even his children, himself.
"Debt peonage", it was called, and it has been incredibly common through human history.
Of course we abolished it in the developed world with things like bankruptcy laws, which acknowledge that no debt is absolute -- ability to pay matters, and the risk assumed by creditors has sometimes to result in losses.
But there is no equivalent international law for entire countries. Instead, the winners are the usual suspects -- the IMF, rich countries, American hedge funds. And the losers get 'structural adjustment': their infrastructure and natural resources sold off, their local industries subject to ahistorical competition, and their social safety nets shredded -- people actually die -- but of course the predatory loans are repaid.
Greece's Varoufakis proposed the only sane alternative: GDP-linked bonds, which ensure that the creditor and the debtor actually have their interests aligned, and Greece's payments can represent what they are actually humanly able to pay. That way it ends up mattering to Germany that Greece's economy has shrunk 25% -- how is that going to help them pay back?
Of course, that was totally ignored.
> Greece hopes to get billions of $ based on some napkin calculations.
No, let's keep the emphasis in the right place, so it is clear who is being unreasonable here: Greece needs short-term loans to pay back existing loans, and it needs that time so that it can put forward more detailed proposals that challenge the neoliberal austerity doctrine, which is really a convenient facade for deeper political strategems.
> Reason is Greece does not want to commit to any foreign influence because it feels nationally threatened.
Foreign influence? Is that a euphemism for when your national infrastructure is privatized and sold off to foreign companies, for when your pensioners resort to begging, for when hospitals shut down, your young people have 40% unemployment, etc? I mean, the active destruction and plunder of your country?
And the emphasis on foreign is misplaced: continued austerity will kindle yet more nationalistic, fascistic, racist, and xenophobic political movements across the continent. It stands to reason: inflict economic violence on entire nations and people within them become enraged and violent, although they direct their own violence against those even weaker and more disenfranchised.
I feel like I shouldn't have to point out that the second world war followed the debt crisis of a nation that was put under a completely unrealistic, punitive repayment regime.
> The IMF enforces a way by which it hopes to a.) get the money back it puts in b.) no need to put money back in 5y in the future. You could make this about money or investment, or you can make this about right-wing/left-wing.
There's a moral dimension, independent of politics. Should an international bank, whose shareholders are the very richest countries, profit at the expense of the ruination of a small nation that happens to be the actual seat of democracy?
If anyone is interested, there's a fair amount of new stuff in 10.1. Here's a quick summary:
http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/quick-revision-history.ht...
and here's a more detailed list of new functions:
http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SummaryOfNewFeat...
There should be some blog-posts in the next few weeks to summarize the major areas.
Are they using more than ImageNet? The ImageNet dataset(s) are not hard to get.
After Fukushima, I don't think most people would agree the risks are well understood, at least as reflected in the actions of the nuclear industry and its regulators.
The NRC (and hence most of the world's regulators) uses a "design basis" approach to establish what emergencies reactors should be able to respond to safely without the release of radioactive materials. The design basis is supposed to quantify the known risks.
In 2011 we saw just how inadequate the design basis framework was. It failed to predict risks such as multiple systems failing simultaneously, emergency generators being flooded, the plant being cut off from external help, multiple meltdowns happening simultaneously, valves getting stuck open, and a litany of other things that actually happened, resulting in the level 7 accident we saw.
While the exact set of events that happened at Fukushima Daiichi is unique, similar accidents could happen in the US, or indeed anywhere (e.g. many reactors are downstream from major dams and could theoretically experience catastrophic flooding).
And just as the NRC's computer models deemed Fukushima impossible before the accident, the NRC has largely ignored the recommendations of its own near-term task force in how to improve the regulatory situation in the US after the accident.
It is up to us to demand that the nuclear power industry, which is wielding technology of massive destructive power at the behest of its shareholders, transform itself into the transparent, accountable industry we deserve.