dmreedy

16 ms·

181.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Sometimes the results of science map to our intuition. Sometimes they don't. Both outcomes are interesting, and neither should be assumed.
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Not so much in psych, where language remains a pretty fundamental mystery, but from the philosophy of language side, word embeddings are, I think it's fair to say, fundamentally an implementation of Sassurian structuralism and semiotic
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by dmreedy 8y ago
As a preface, I started writing this quite a long time ago, and it was much more strident then, during the height of the initial Deep Learning surge. I've tried to temper it a bit, and some of the ideas are perhaps a bit past their p
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Bad Metaphors(dmreedy.com)
1 points by dmreedy 8y ago|1 comments
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by dmreedy 8y ago
I've had the pleasure of interacting with the codebase that played Jeopardy! and from where I stand, it's still one of the most impressive and beautifully-orchestrated systems I've ever seen. You are correct in your write-up
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by dmreedy 8y ago
There was a post on HN a couple years ago that I should probably have dug up instead of vaguely gesturing at, but here we are. Anyway, it described the transition to digital technology as moving towards "magical rocks". They are a
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by dmreedy 8y ago
This is not entirely uncommon when it comes to tank watch cases. Indeed, here is an image of the movement from the trope namer, a Cartier Tank: https://smhttp-ssl-39255.nexcesscdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2...
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by dmreedy 8y ago
I heard a little nugget the other day that, at its height in the early Roman period, the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has
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by dmreedy 8y ago
"Well, perhaps no systems are attainable, but the search for a system is very interesting." This is the heart of so many things that do not have easy answers, especially philosophy. I see the field dismissed frequently as an exerc
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by dmreedy 8y ago
It seems to have a pretty coherent thesis to me. "They started with some good ideas, some luck, great timing, got lots of people to believe in their rosy vision, and they won the unicorn lottery. Little did they know or care what probl
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Given your analogy, perhaps you mean to say, "negative emotion"? Because I think a better match for removing emotion altogether would be arguing that removing the ability to walk is healthy because you might trip and fall. I shoul
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by dmreedy 8y ago
It reminds me very much of Whitman's The Untold Want . Or at least, how I've always read it. A very lovely poem indeed.
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that that's because it was an equally crass attempt at stimulating that kind of emotional investment. You don't get feelings for free. They are contextual things with many more dimensions that what
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by dmreedy 8y ago
There's a lot of emotional weight in the article, "The". A watch is an interesting thing from a functional perspective, technical perspective, an artistic perspective, and a broader historical perspective. But it's an
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by dmreedy 8y ago
before Babel, perhaps
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by dmreedy 8y ago
While having a trade language is quite a handy thing, for the reasons you enumerate, if you believe even a little bit in some degree of Linguistic Relativity, then there are significant consequences to reducing the general discourse, and th
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by dmreedy 8y ago
I prefer to think of it as just the one impossible question, and the many efforts to try and shape it in such a way that its answer becomes apparent. Or, at the very least, that the incorrectness of other proposed answers becomes apparent (
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by dmreedy 8y ago
or, more typically in my experience, (and somewhat more worryingly), "I don't understand that people with economic, social, and cultural differences exist". To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, it's like the traveling Briton vi
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by dmreedy 8y ago
As too went the government space programs, until the disasters in each started happening. The sense of awe sticks around though. I don't know, I still will from time to time get a little sense of vertigo when I'm in an airplane an
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Without revealing too much (and possibly this qualifies as spoilers anyway), in Seveneves (Stephenson, not Asimov), it is a comet that, in a sense, 'becomes' the ship.
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by dmreedy 8y ago
I think there's even an extra layer of nuance here as well. At the risk of sounding prescriptivist, "I don't know what this is" is a statement, not a question; appending a question mark to it changes its tone, and seems
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Perhaps it's the opposite angle. When they're all family, it's understandable why things were so stable. Any nationalism and cultural differences that might cause tribalistic wars were tempered by family ties and shared blo
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by dmreedy 8y ago
If this subject is interesting to you, and you haven't read Mindstorms yet, I cannot recommend it enough. The entire book is an exploration of the significance of mental models in learning. A quote from the opening: 'BEFORE I WA
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Incidentally, there has been some recent publication indicating that this may not be true, albeit for different reasons than the typical Radium Girls pathology: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/news/wwii-military-watches-p
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by dmreedy 8y ago
And later picked up the cohort under the Marian reforms for reasons as well, especially once the Gauls began hitting them with frontal charges again.
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by dmreedy 8y ago
To quote Sam Seaborn, "Because it's next"
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by dmreedy 8y ago
The fantastic featured bit on the accenting aside, in the full video he breaks down a possible model for the way Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter. He turns it almost in to sheet music; you know the time signature by way of the mete
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Do you imagine that other, more successful "AI" services from large companies do not involve a lot of hand-coded things?
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Practical demonstration and motivation of formula is one thing, but I think there's another axis that's quite important, and perhaps what the GP was alluding to: the means by which people figured out that their intuitions were w
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by dmreedy 8y ago
I'm going to draw up some charts about hull displacement on ships from the dawn of time up until about 1950. Then we can have a really informed conversation about the naval power of countries through the ages. I think we need to be rea

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