I definitely prefer non-fiction. I do make an effort to connect with people about current series/movies. But it is an effort, not something spontaneous. I feel bad sometimes that I can come across as too analytical. I'm not! I feel awe and deep emotion looking at documentaries, for example, or at the space station footage of the Earth. That is mind-blowing and very moving.
I noticed this the other day talking to my brother. He was excited about a new episode of House of Cards? I think. I watched it, it was cool. The representation of all the forces and intrigues inside American politics. Interesting! But then I tried to small talk, and said regarding the current election (and I am not American, btw): 'You know, I think Hillary is as corrupt as Sanders and Trump!'. He said with a blank face 'Oh sorry, I don't really know about that'. I immediately felt the disconnect between us.
I follow American politics mainly through Stephen Colbert and other comedians; I'm not too analytical and dry as to just read serious journals or political books: I like entertainment, but entertainment that contains at least a little bit of information about reality. I just can't spend a weekend watching a fictional series when I could be learning something about the real state of affairs, even superficially.
And I just don't want to judge people that like to do that, I even consider it as the normal, balanced thing to do. But I do feel how other people judge me for my preferences of entertainment, but I just can't help it.
I confirmed that the official app does not give the optimum experience. I experimented with Disco Hue and Hue Pro.
Hue Pro is good, and straight forward. I like the 'energize' and 'concentrate' settings, basically bright yellows. At night, I like to set 'deep blue', I find it relaxing. The warm colors are really cool, the oranges, reds and purples. It can really set the ambiance for making out with your partner, if that's your thing, LOL.
I schedule the 'energize' setting at 7 a.m., and this kinda forces me to wake up :p. I like scheduling on/off times to help me structure my day, because honestly I tend to be late.
One thing I like about Hue Pro is that there is an option with 'X' 'Y' sliders that allows you to select different colors than the RGB approach.
I dunno... I find the notion of crying as a reaction to fictional (or even non-fictional) media... foreign. I find this notion foreign. (Man, just a goatee, almost 33). I do consume fiction, but I just don't 'suspend disbelief', as it is called. Call me a fiction grinch, but it's just the way my brain works.
I recently changed jobs and moved to a new city. When, after a long hiring process I was given the job, I cried a little (like 10 seconds), out of joy. Then, once I arrived in the city, it was hard to find a new home but I faced it without victimism: I decided to move, so I had the obligation to face whatever hardships would emerge along the way. But the day I finally found a home and everything started to settle, when I finally had the keys, I sat down on one of the rooms and, beer in hand, cried, but out of relief and joy also.
When I was younger I used to cry easily, but as I'm getting older I just don't cry often anymore. Somewhat it has become a reaction reserved for existential highlights, so to speak.
I purchased my Philipps Hue system kinda impulsively (and somewhat drunkenly) because I was interested in the colors and the automation.
I thought it was 'nice to have'. But I underestimated the overall effect it has in my mood and my schedule. Previously I didn't know what to think about scientific claims in regards to the influence of light on mood, but now that I'm experiencing it first hand I can say it does have a significant effect on me.
It helps me structure my day, fall asleep, wake up, setting ambiances to read, relax or to be creative. Yes, I could have saved up money by trying to go the DIY route with Arduino, but I'm not very good at hardware. It's not a gadget that is collecting dust, it's something that bathes -for lack of a better word- my whole indoor environment every day. It's cool.
How come there is no legislation that limits what software corporations are allowed to do? Just imagine if regular companies that deal with physical stuff were allowed to do the same. It's like if they broke into your house to replace or 'upgrade' your stuff without your consent. Companies can literally break into people's homes and change stuff.
As long as changes and 'upgrades' correlate with net gains for investors and shareholders, it's all good. It's all that matters. We are faced with faceless super-agents, we can't realistically complain to anyone, nobody is responsible. I hope the era of user empowerment comes soon, and this kind of mammoth-sized digital stomping over humans ends.
Hey, yes! If reverse image search is possible now, it should be easy to automatically give credit to original creators, connect them with audiences and bypass blogspam!
I wish an image service existed that did some image recognition on the picture and provided you with relevant, but subtle 'Learn more about this thing' links.
For me it works this way: when I think I'm sad/depressed I ask if I'm just hungry. I can easily forget to eat, and this has consequences for my state of mind. I need to reassure myself that I'm not depressed, I just need some nutrients. Then I eat and I find I'm no longer sad.
I agree. I feel this points towards the limits of linguistic-based technology. Relying just on text strings to find correlations/matches is not enough. What I wonder is: why don't recommendation engines go beyond and try to cluster entities by more sophisticated means? It must be possible to determine that, in this case, the person involved was not clustered -not 'close enough'- to the universe of entities related to white supremacists. Relying just on words/names will lead to this kinds of results, specially where ambiguity is involved (the person's name is unfortunately very common).
I think you're right when you say that a big sector of the population has been ignored. Normal, working families are asking 'hey what about us?', but why hasn't a corresponding political movement arisen to answer to those demands? A movement that doesn't echoes past ideologies like fascism?
And it is not correct to say that 'right wing' parties are not racist or fascists. It is, as you know, a spectrum, from the regular, peaceful working person feeling ignored, to the outright neo-fascists and xenophobes. It is a sad situation that this spectrum encompasses such different people.
Until a humanistic right wing emerges to answer peacefully to legitimate demands, present-day right wing parties will keep propagating and mirroring hate and racism.
Yes, humans are also very hyped organisms. Lets dispel the notion that a defining trait of humans is producing or processing highly complex language patterns.
For us beginners, professionals from other areas that want to use Python as an additional tool, this situation is quite confusing. I'm doing Python MOOCs and most of them focus on Python 2. I don't have a massive code base to maintain like most of you, I just would like to know what path to follow, Py2 or jump already to Py3.
Even more strangely, I also installed pytesseract yesterday. I was having trouble getting the visible text from a project's web pages. I thought it'd be easy to screenshot the pages and OCR them. It didn't work, at least my first experiment produced just gibberish. Then I just used BeautifulSoup and I got it done. I don't know why I didn't think of the easier solution first.
"The time has come to hit the DELETE key." So, after all, he is using a computer metaphor? The author proceeds with an priori agenda, rather than looking at facts and arriving at conclusions. I can't find a spot where he tries to see if his claims are falseable. His approach is unscientific. To be fair, his essay contains falseability ideas to test against current ideas of intelligence as the capacity of entities to consume and apply information.
A further frustration might be with computers themselves. I don't see why an introduction/exposition to computing should be something that needs pardon.
Ok, it seems this step is done. Face recognition, check. What's next? Does somebody knows the state of voice recognition (in the sense of ID'ing someone by his/her voice)?
I can't affirm I know about patents, or why some company files a patent. I understand one or two things about translation technology though, and I'm trying to express why I think this is valuable for Google in the context of industrial translation.
Why is Google patenting this tech? It's cutting-edge machine translation. The rest of the industry is still talking about statistical machine translation. The sector is moving very fast. With the recent SyntaxNet release and neural machine translation, Google is approaching the dream: universal automatic translation, which, by the way, is an innovation goal of Obama's administration.
> And there's no need for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms.
This. I look forward to a future where science is made by machines. What we know so far has the imprint of human values and limitations. I am very suspicious when a theory 'makes too much human sense'. Reality has no obligation whatsoever to be intelligible. What really is, outside from the human mind, has a structure that is unfathomable complex: human knowledge is necessarily a reduced representation of a tiny slice of such underlying reality. And most science is pragmatical science for human purposes, not fundamental work towards the comprehension of the inner workings of reality. This is a task for superior intelligent beings, not for us.
So far I can recall other two instances of machine learning going unfortunately wrong: that time when a Google image algorithm tagged a black person as 'gorilla'; when recently, Google translate translated "a man has to clean" literally as "a woman has to clean" in Spanish. Should developers be now more aware of unintended consequences of this technology? Or is it too unpredictable? What can we learn from this examples?
For me, it's very clear how work/life balance is affected by working at home vs. working at the office. If I work at the office all the time, my home slowly becomes a mess: I'm always running late and I don't have time to clean up and organize my home. I don't eat. I start hating everything. I'm less productive at the office because I didn't eat and probably didn't sleep well. I can't concentrate. Forced socialization makes me miserable. When I go home I get depressed because I find a mess and I don't have energy to clean up. However, if I work at home, I work very happily, ideas start to flow, I concentrate, I take my breakfast when I need to, I take breaks not just to drink coffee and do the small talk thing some like, but to clean up a bit my home, eat, do errands, etc. If I stay at home, I'm happy, my home is clean and organized, I eat, and my balance feels right.
My experience: Twitter has been very useful to get to know influencial people in my line of work. Also, to practice concise expression of ideas. The problem is, Twitter is not very actionable. Yeah, the CEO of X company now follows you. What now? I found following people and writing posts in LinkedIn is more actionable. I connect with leaders in my industry to whom I can send a CV quickly.