bbctol

28 ms·

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by bbctol 10y ago
Authors might be French-speaking, I've seen that error before. EDIT: Actually, after looking it up, this is interesting: In most languages except English, Switzerland is referred to by the adjective. That is, in Italian it's &quot
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by bbctol 10y ago
Kind of sounds like they had this in the pipeline, and rolled it out after the tweet. But hey, the tweet is a good way to turn this into a "Elon Musk is great at customer service" story rather than a "Tesla suddenly rolls out
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by bbctol 10y ago
This is a real problem as it intersects with race; a lot of civil rights advocacy in the 60s promoted racial district packing, so that sizeable African-American minorities could have their own representation. This is in the Voting Rights Ac
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by bbctol 10y ago
The author doesn't mention guilt. For some reason, every time someone says "privilege," there are people who hear "YOU SHOULD FEEL GUILTY!" even when that's not remotely what's being said. Acknowledging pr
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by bbctol 10y ago
You could also history is stained by the ancient Greeks--and thus the present is stained by ancient Greek thinking, which is exactly why it's so important to study. Aspects of morality or the scientific method that we take for granted
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by bbctol 10y ago
Hey, I remember reading that Atlantic article and being curious to see other things you'd written! Pity you don't have an easy-to-Google name... A question regarding the spreadsheet: have you found it better to just list every pit
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by bbctol 10y ago
Honestly, the current state of neural backpropagation research is still in flux and papers will be pretty technical. My background's in neuroscience, and the rough summary of what we know so far is: action potentials can travel backwar
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by bbctol 10y ago
RELU is decidedly the more "biologically accurate" (or at least biologically inspired) compared to the sigmoid function. The idea put forth to originally justify RELUs was that neurons in the brain only have action potentials or l
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by bbctol 10y ago
Zuckerberg 2020: Because enlightened despotism is better than the regular kind!
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by bbctol 10y ago
"But, "the Internet" is done already. It had a great historic arc, but it maxed out on its own excesses and unconfronted issues, much like the Space Age and atomic power did. Anybody who still thinks "net neutrality&q
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by bbctol 10y ago
Well, the "fully automated" part increasingly coming true; we'll see how much the luxury spreads.
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by bbctol 10y ago
Why would I trust you/your friends as researchers? Establishment journalism has problems, but you're basically suggesting that you do the same journalistic tasks, except one source removed from the truth and without any backing.
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by bbctol 10y ago
Just check HN every 3-4 hours... I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282625 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13271844 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276542 on
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by bbctol 10y ago
Of course manufacturing jobs have shifted overseas; I can't imagine anyone disputing that. I'm not sure what that table means in this context, though. Replacement of smaller manufacturers with larger conglomerates is indeed a majo
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by bbctol 10y ago
I laugh and/or cry every time someone on HN responds to fears of the rich entirely abandoning the lower classes with "but then they'll have no one to buy their products and make them money!" or "but you still need p
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by bbctol 10y ago
I've been finding this graph: https://tropicsofmeta.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/2007-real-... very helpful (y-axis is percentages of GDP and workforce.) Manufacturing never left the US, in terms of output, it
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by bbctol 10y ago
This is unfair of me; there are lots of pundits as bad as him or worse, but he's become the designated punching-bag on parts of the internet of people who thought Trump would never make it. Throughout the primaries, he was incredibly d
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by bbctol 10y ago
So I'm not criticizing Trump here per se (I mean I really dislike him, but that wasn't what I was getting at.) My point is more that this distinction between "skin in the game"/"no skin in the game" that T
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by bbctol 10y ago
Taleb's style is generally... insufferable, but it's a good way to remind yourself that how nice someone's writing is isn't necessarily a sign of how good their ideas here. He takes great joy, for better or for worse, in
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by bbctol 10y ago
I think the distinction between those who have "skin in the game" and those who survive on arbitrary indicators of prestige is an important one culturally , but especially as applied to Trump, I still think it's weird Taleb
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by bbctol 10y ago
...how do you know?
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by bbctol 10y ago
I agree that a lack of precision with respect to correspondence with the real world is inevitable. I don't think that at all mandates a neural network (and artificial neural networks are only superficially similar to human neurons, and
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by bbctol 10y ago
I'd be careful saying that one is succeeding and another failing, at least to the point of drawing very large conclusions about the nature of intelligence. Under our current level of technology and our current mathematical models, neur
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by bbctol 10y ago
What's with this belief that the only way something can work is if it's kept secret? It's not a "sinister scheme": it's a plan. And it works not because of deception, but because plenty of people believe in it,
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by bbctol 10y ago
Well, his chief strategist is Steve Bannon, whose stated goal is to destroy both sides of the establishment in a Lenin-esque uprising through misleading narratives and clever media manipulation.
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by bbctol 10y ago
From what I've heard, Hofstadter wrote "I am a Strange Loop" because too many people were describing GEB as a "collection of essays" or musings on unrelated topics, when he wanted it to be a single exploration of th
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by bbctol 10y ago
Top prize is ten grand (!) so I expect the essays submitted will be higher quality than your average online contest. I wonder how well I could budget my time over the next few months... this is roughly what I majored in, but it might be bad
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by bbctol 10y ago
And better results than you could possibly expect. I was just getting into playing with audio synthesis, but I figured you'd always need to use spectrograms and get distorted data--then they dropped WaveNet, because screw that, we can
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by bbctol 10y ago
You can also view this more charitably: I think people advocating for UBI far away from the workers it would affect don't realize how patronizing and aggressive it is. If somebody has been working a job for thirty years, a difficult, s
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by bbctol 10y ago
Yes, and it would be a less strong argument. Being a recent immigrant in the United States is not easy, and feeling integrated into the new country is a challenge. Being a recent immigrant to China is incredibly hard, and feeling integrated

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