bbctol

116 ms·

511.
by bbctol 10y ago
IIRC Lego are made with incredibly precise tolerances, in part because that really is important to getting such small bricks to lock together, and in part because the family that owns the company has a cultural fixation with it.
512.
by bbctol 10y ago
I'd say it more turned out that Circles were decidedly unintuitive, and far more of a pain to use than Facebook's single list (which can still be heavily customized, most people just don't bother.)
513.
by bbctol 10y ago
It's an interesting paper, but I really worry that headlines like this veer into mysticism. The TL;DR is that if we want to understand why neural networks are so effective, we need to remember that the sets they've been trained to
514.
by bbctol 10y ago
Social networks pose a really interesting problem to the usual capitalist model, where competition (y'know, theoretically) ensures the best outcomes for consumers over the long run. If you build a definitely better automobile than Gene
515.
by bbctol 10y ago
I don't mean to disagree, just share a fun fact: the Atacama is actually so dry, parts of it are barely an ecosystem at all. Obviously, the life that does exist there is quite sensitive, but there's large swathes of desert that ar
516.
by bbctol 10y ago
China wants a blue-water navy, and they want to keep US military bases far enough away that a pre-emptive strike is difficult. Their Pacific coast is blocked off by opposed states: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are protected by the United
517.
by bbctol 10y ago
Wow! I'd been playing around with machine learning and audio, and this blows even my hilariously far-future fantasies of speech generation out of the water. I guess when you're DeepMind, you have both the brainpower and resources
518.
by bbctol 10y ago
Sounds to me like they started with something like "Being easy to pick up, Python is becoming increasingly ubiquitous..." and then made the old engineer-as-writer error of adding extra specificity.
519.
by bbctol 10y ago
And plenty of Silicon Valley startups have rich/well-connected parents involved as well.
520.
by bbctol 10y ago
His point is really that perceiving reality may not be correlated with fitness that well. It's a shame this work has been taken up by a lot of pop press philosophizing, because the actual research is quite interesting, and the philos
521.
by bbctol 10y ago
This is the same company that Facebook was going to use with Internet.org. It looks like after Facebook's attempt was blocked, he realized he didn't have to be a middleman, and could just offer cheap service on his infrastructure
522.
by bbctol 10y ago
He had pretty extreme stage fright, hence the sunglasses and staring downward. By all accounts, just a very shy guy with a knack for clever jokes.
523.
by bbctol 10y ago
It's also noteworthy that "sounding similar to a cult" and "sounding similar to a tech startup" can both be applied...
524.
by bbctol 10y ago
He was a hell of a lot more clown-like than his contemporaries, who had accurate measurements of the size of the Earth and the length of Eurasia. Columbus didn't trust maps not made by Christians, and refused to believe China wasn&#x
525.
by bbctol 10y ago
Terrible understanding of labor economics. Football players and firefighters are not static populations, they are also subject to labor forces; people choose to enter jobs based on the quality of the job and the pay. Heck, Tom Brady would p
526.
by bbctol 10y ago
I don't remember which one, but one of the plethora of "teach yourself to code!" guides floating around the web has all of their code snippets as images, so every time you used one of their example programs, you had to type i
527.
by bbctol 10y ago
Hard work and luck are both necessary and both insufficient for success. That's the very clearly stated argument of the article.
528.
by bbctol 10y ago
Fortune can favor the bold, with boldness still being correlated with failure. There are plenty of hard-working people in the game, willing to take big risks and skillful enough to follow through on them, who still end up losing.
529.
by bbctol 10y ago
The Scottish Darien Company attempted to establish a colony in Panama in the late 1600s, to compete with England. Backed by almost half the money in Scotland, they completely failed at establishing a colony, lied about it, got more money an
530.
by bbctol 10y ago
The note about technology increasing winner-take-all systems is important, and one that has applied throughout human history; technology has always run ahead of our normal capacity for work, so that by increasing the power of any individual
531.
by bbctol 10y ago
This patent seems rather more narrow than the title suggests.
532.
by bbctol 10y ago
Well, I for one am non-rhetorically, legitimately curious about how well human sorters do.
533.
by bbctol 10y ago
What even is "Watson"? It looks like it's just IBM's AI department, but they talk about it as if it's a single program. I know that the Watson that's being applied to medical diagnoses is at least somewhat rela
534.
by bbctol 10y ago
At the same time, we'll (hopefully) keep pushing the boundaries of code further. Developing CSS and spreadsheet tools just made the code that we do have to write line-by-line more interesting and powerful. We'll never stop writing
535.
by bbctol 10y ago
This has been going around the internet as an example of when trying to teach kids fun facts slips into terrifying Lovecraftian evil.
536.
by bbctol 10y ago
The fact that it may or may not work is hardly a reason to not spend tax dollars on it... the government sends lots of money towards academic research and other scientific projects that individually have a low chance of amounting to much.
537.
by bbctol 10y ago
But why do you think that any hint of being advertising discredits the content? Surely if there's reason to think that, you'd want to know if content is discreditable? Or do you just think that the masses will mistakenly discredit
538.
by bbctol 10y ago
But you can still label it with that specificity--I've seen Internet celebrities close videos with "Yes, I really do love this product, but I am also getting paid for this." Transparency about when money is being transferred
539.
by bbctol 10y ago
Not having windows seems like an important part of the test! It looks like there might be a small porthole on one of the sides, but I doubt a real Martian habitat would have much more than that, and the psychological impacts would be intere
540.
by bbctol 10y ago
I hacked together a (very, very, very rough) "opposing view reader" for myself before I had heard of this idea; it pulled data from Pew's 2014 political spectrum of news sources ( http://www.journalism.org/inte

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