api

242 ms·

10501.
by api 8y ago
Gas can also be produced from biological and even synthetic processes. There's been a great deal of research in producing CH4 from CO2 and H2O using surplus electric power from wind, solar, and off-peak nuclear. That means someday all
10502.
by api 8y ago
There's a reason banks have secure vaults, armored cars, incredible amounts of security around databases, multiple backups, cold storage, ... Turns out people like to steal money.
10503.
by api 8y ago
The malware this USB device installs had better be called "Fan Death."
10504.
by api 8y ago
You can if you know what the higher level abstraction is. That kind of thing doesn't work when your learning algorithm doesn't have a programmer / mathematician to babysit it who knows more than it does. ... unless God is sit
10505.
by api 8y ago
Something very similar happens when companies outsource to lower skilled much cheaper overseas engineers. I'm not aware of a single example of that where the company hasn't lost ground as a result. But hey it looks good on a sprea
10506.
by api 8y ago
That is also weird. Brains may use gradient descent but that can't be the only way they learn. Gradient descent alone is almost completely incapable of escaping a local maximum.
10507.
by api 8y ago
I really can't believe anyone argues that brains can just be gradient descent. It's like people have never heard of a fitness valley or a sparsely connected graph region.
10508.
by api 8y ago
There is some truth in this. Two and two will never be five. Unfortunately I most often see the notion of eternal unchanging truth invoked to defend very temporal and mutable things: cultural and aesthetic biases, social and economic hierar
10509.
by api 8y ago
What would constitute evidence of this? The 1000th particle? 10000th? You can always argue that may be the last one.
10510.
by api 8y ago
Elon is doing it wrong. You're supposed to waste government funding, not deliver stuff. I only half joke. He's threatening a massive gravy train by showing that government really ought to expect more from private contractors. Why
10511.
by api 8y ago
I think the idea of a giant fuel air bomb the size of a small skyscraper falling on Los Angeles is a barrier here.
10512.
by api 8y ago
MS hasn't been cool since the 80s and even then its coolness was debatable.
10513.
by api 8y ago
You can also code in a language with good cross platform network APIs like Go or use a wrapper library like boost::asio or libuv. The latter are likely to add support for this eventually if there is a strong benefit to doing so on MacOS. I&
10514.
by api 8y ago
Steve Jobs once quipped that conspiracy theory is optimistic. It assumes that someone somewhere has some idea what is happening and can actually steer the ship.
10515.
by api 8y ago
We did interview several strong female candidates. One we really wanted but she ended up taking a different job closer to her home. (We're in LA/OC and she would have been forced to take the 55. There is a "one does not simpl
10516.
by api 8y ago
That is better than what I have seen. Where it was possible to tell I have never seen a black applicant to a programming job. That is as a founder and in previous roles where I helped review resumes and do interviews. We also saw something
10517.
by api 8y ago
This is what a decade of dominance does to a company. Success kills.
10518.
by api 8y ago
That is how most things happen. They emerge from evolutionary pressures, game theoretic dynamics, or just as emergent properties of the rule set in operation. The result looks like a conspiracy but in reality it's driven by the furious
10519.
by api 8y ago
Yeah that's bad. Another big concentration is government contractors, especially huge ones. We had this idea that we would eliminate waste by privatizing government work. Hahahahahahahah...
10520.
by api 8y ago
Yup. You figure out pretty quick that the vast bulk of all economic activity is digging holes and filling them up again. I have worked in government, academia, and large-ish companies and you find a ton of bullshit work in all three. I woul
10521.
by api 8y ago
It's a more politically viable solution than large tax increases or nominal benefit cuts and a much less painful solution than default. It also "solves" the impending student loan crisis by writing down all those loans. Maybe
10522.
by api 8y ago
You'll receive social security. Benefits will be in tomorrow's inflated dollars but at today's amounts. I've been predicting huge inflation for a long time for the simple reason that housing has inflated so much. Housing
10523.
by api 8y ago
You see this a lot in machine learning. Reward a neural network or evolutionary algorithm for identifying squirrels vs. cats and you'll get one that compares one pixel of the usually beige wall color in mostly indoor shots of cats vs.
10524.
by api 8y ago
The West invented this stuff, though our implementation is less centralized and relies much more heavily on the private sector. The Chinese are just copying it.
10525.
by api 8y ago
I'm of the opinion that economic statistics become almost worthless from the perspective of politics and policy once you get to a certain sample size. A cost of living statistic that averages out cost of living between say Michigan and
10526.
by api 8y ago
I call it the "boring universe brigade." They go far beyond criticizing fringe science and pseudoscience, tending to also pile onto pretty much anything that is too new even if its entirely within known laws of physics.
10527.
by api 8y ago
If your mind is too closed nothing gets in. Like virtually everything else in biology and learning theory the optimum is not at either "edge" of the parameter space but somewhere in between. Willingness to entertain model-breaking
10528.
by api 8y ago
I'm still glad such experiments were done and even that they continue to be done. We should be open minded enough to ask crazy questions from time to time.
10529.
by api 8y ago
Did Moore's law really stagnate as much as we think or do we just have a lazy monopoly?
10530.
by api 8y ago
Like most such critiques this is thick on criticism and thin on alternatives or solutions.

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