twak

I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.

I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).

you can build it and simply use it in your own office? There is no need to shout about it if the cost of writing software goes to zero (but the value remains non-zero!).

i agree; but perhaps also it is the difference between managers and SWE? The former (SWE team leaders included) can see that engineers aren't perfect. The latter are often highly focused on determinism (this works/doesn't) and struggle with conflicting goals.

Through a career SWEs start rigid and overly focused on the immediate problem and become flexible/error-tolerant[1] as they become system (mechanical or meat) managers. this maps to an observation that managers like AI solutions - because they compare favourably to the new hire - and because they have the context to make this observation.

[1] https://grugbrain.dev/#:~:text=grug%20note%20humourous%20gra...

i used to do lots of graphics, and love these bugs. They give an enjoyable insight to the development process and algorithms as the progress through a project!

i have my own archive of my own bugs/"artworks" - https://twak.org/glitches-in-the-worlds-geometry-engine/

The Turing had an interesting approach to naming, not only stealing the Glasgow group's name, but also choosing the initials 'ATI' (in 2015...).

It's recently struggling for relevance.

https://www.ft.com/content/6bfea441-e16c-499a-a887-69f735c29... (https://archive.ph/ujfhb)

I hope they turn it around because the UK need for AI academic coordination/leadership is so high.

My old supervisor wrote a book on computational socialism back in 93. I rather like some of the ideas (can a participatory centrally planned economy work now that we have internet/cybernetics?), but suspect it wouldn't work in practice.

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

fantastic book. Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection.

I haven't found a definition of consciousness which is quantifiable or stands up to serious rigour. If it can't be measured and isn't necessary for intelligence, perhaps there is no magic cut-off between the likes of Dall-E and human intelligence. Perhaps the Chinese-room is as conscious as a human (and a brick)?

Other causes include the pressure to publish quickly in ML (while your approach is en vogue), with small teams, before your funding runs out, while hitting conference deadlines.

In these situations, I have suggested releasing anonymous implementations after the paper is accepted just to get the code out there. I am not certain this is the right thing to do!

Academics are judged by the publications not their implementations, so the system favours over-sold manuscripts and it-ran-once implementations. Until funding is conditional-on (and provided for) robust well maintained code it will remain challenging to get reproducibility.

Frequently the PIs (bosses) will not even glance at the repositories written by junior members, probably can't read code anyway, and certainly won't allocate time for their maintenance. Even worse, most academics who do publish code have never been exposed to real world software engineers, their techniques, or tools.

> It’s not to say the developers and scientists at Adobe are lesser

adobe research scientists are crazy-strong in the area of deep/neural graphics[1]. Perhaps we should disentangle adobe research from photoshop?

[1] https://research.adobe.com/publications/

Look awesome - I've been looking for some hackable code like this to present my photos from google drive. Cheap photo hosting from google + minimal load on my server...

Within the UK there is a large variety of cycling cultures. Cambridge is a city where everyone cycles to work in jeans/office clothes.

(Don't confuse "track bikes" and "road bikes"...)

a counter point: when cycling in London you have to be aware that 30% of the time there will be be a vehicle stopped the protected bike zone in front of the lights...

I guess I was thinking that a good way to simplify many video UIs would be to remove these buttons. Perhaps the browser-esque way of providing this functionality would be to use bookmarks instead?

Goal was to create a platform for sharing user video that would otherwise be too awful to watch. By dropping length, but increasing variety, it's easier to create something like to watch...

More info on why we do this in the browser: http://www.twak.co.uk/2016/04/browser-video-splicing.html

The papers written at Esri R&D Zurich this year also include: CGA++ http://research.michael-schwarz.com/publ/2015/cgapp/ Interactive Handles (by me!) http://twak.blogspot.ch/2015/03/interactive-dimensioning-of-...

Pascal has published, and keeps publishing lots of stuff on procedural modeling (all while directing the Esri research center): https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=zzMlobMAAAAJ

It's always slightly surreal to see your employer on the front page of hn, even more so when you find you find your colleague making the second comment.

Another solution is to put the pixel order in the html header.

A smart browser showing the same page spread over two different monitors would then download twice as much, but everyone else would be happy.

It's easy to imagine EC2 expanding beyond 1U servers and databases to GPGPUs, FGPAs or quantum cores. There's a lot of potential for a gpu cloud - from quick rendering (xtraNormal/nVidia Gelato) to scientific computing (Larrabee?).

"hacker"

Glasgow

starts getting interesting on the second page, worth a read for the fantastic quote:

“Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

So, moving away from the point of the post- yes there are many smart & cool CTOs, CEOs & MDs that didn't go to Oxbridge.

But what you learn at uni is proportional to delta^2 in the intelligences of the people around you. If it's harder to get in, the people are smarter, and you learn more. There's less drag, classes move faster. You don't need to be a-CEO-level-handshaker to meet the right people, because there are so many. Oxbridge have obscene resources - classes to print your own chips or 1:2 tuition that the next layer of universities down don't get.

There is a mini-valley-effect going on there, that makes it much more likely for someone to act smart if they've been to an elitist university.

Yes I'm bitter. (Yes they rejected me)

yes, it's a generalisation. yes, oxbridgians put both legs into a trouser. however the system does build up palpable differences in ability between a general oxford student and someone just as smart who ends up somewhere else.

But the bulk of the post is about the effect of working with well schooled individuals - if you're not as smart then copying their mannerisms can often be a world of hurt for all.

you just made my day by posting that link - how did you find that post? (was a late night rant commenting on office politics). Very nice to see :) but maybe typical of hn's fall from grace from "how to be the best" to "how to compete with the best"

yes. but it makes health insurance a non-issue for companies. we don't compete over it & we're not scared of loosing it with our jobs.

the American system forces the individual to be responsible for their health (smoker? that'll cost) and keeps workers focussed on pleasing their employers.

We don't use unit testing because 1) it kills agility. We're small, new & rewrite our software base every year. Complete code coverage slows us down by a factor of two and doesn't give that time back (so far) in reduced dev time. 2) we have a graphical application that's hard to unit test. 3) it's shooting bugs in a barrel & assuming that because you don't hit a bug there aren't any.

<shameless blog plug> "So is it fair that the GPL doesn't give back to the proving ground of new ideas, the commercial world?" http://moviestorm.blogspot.com/2008/01/gpl-vs-startups.html

all these ideas are a little experimental. how can we try them out without nuking this community?

use a pagerank-like karma assignment (high karma people give more karma). it's better than having a slashdotesque editor. (and the only thing our grahamist overlords would have to do is to kill someone's karma if they go off topic)