dmreedy

31 ms·

241.
by dmreedy 9y ago
Strong Sapir-Whorf is likely untrue. Sapir-Whorf is contentious. Linguistic Relativism in general is by no means disproved. It just goes through phases of popularity, like any ideas about human experience. At any given time it has some numb
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by dmreedy 9y ago
By all means, they can slot it in between their three jobs. Not everyone has the means for political action. Frequently, those who need it most are those least able to participate.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I think that's a pretty narrow, reductionist take, asserting that they don't add any new value to Facebook. Those "high demand, highly skilled workers" don't support themselves (clearly). Neither is the perceived va
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Because fundamentally, every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable, and in practice, every premise is routinely rejected. Unlike physics, where there is one tower and it is built high by many hands, in Philosophy, there are
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by dmreedy 9y ago
my experience with pdf is that its a pretty open-ended, and thus pretty difficult, format to work with. There's not a whole lot in the way of "what is this thing supposed to be" semantics encoded into the spec. Even pdf-to-ht
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The Watch That Almost Destroyed an Entire Industry(bloomberg.com)
2 points by dmreedy 9y ago|0 comments
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by dmreedy 9y ago
This is precisely the pattern of past winters. The technical achievements don't go anywhere. But the hype dwindles, and funding and public interest accordingly, as disappointment and skepticism grows. It doesn't permanently stop
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by dmreedy 9y ago
If you can find them, read the papers on Question Analysis and Answer Coercion. I am still impressed by how powerful these systems were, and how effective. UIMA is a framework for tying algorithms together, and experimenting quickly with di
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by dmreedy 9y ago
If you're interested in a hard copy, these guys did a beautiful print run of it: https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics-standards...
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I dunno, I get the feeling that Matt Levine and the other finance pundits' analysis, though understandably smarmy to believers, is a bit closer to the mark; "The conventional wisdom is that cryptocurrency is about re-learning all
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by dmreedy 9y ago
This couldn't really be stated any more clearly[1]; well put. I'll only add that this is true for any variety of abstraction, natural language included. Abstractions encode the biases of their creators[2]. The 'power' of
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Yes, but you do need to start moving towards germ theory to understand why washing your hands with charcoal instead of soap results in dead patients again. Of course scientific theory and scientific observation are bootstrapped off of each
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by dmreedy 9y ago
If there are, they would be as difficult to recognize as germ theory to a 16th century doctor. We simply don't know enough yet about the mechanism.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I have yet to encounter a system that doesn't have some dramatic set of failures. I also have yet to encounter a system whose failures were not made dramatically more painful by 'players'. The intention is encoded in the term
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by dmreedy 9y ago
It definitely seems to be part of what our brain does. The visual cortex is an apt comparison since that's where a lot of the structural inspiration for modern ANNs comes from. But, there does seem to be a little more than that too; it
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I personally prefer 'generic hashing/parsing'; deep learning excels at the automatic creation of a mapping of unstructured information to structured information, after a sufficient period of training.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Have you ever worked with a realtor? The fee may seem exorbitant because you pay it in a lump sum. But if you were to try and calculate their hourly fee, you'll see even the mediocre ones who are only moderately attentive to their clie
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by dmreedy 9y ago
training speed, training data requirements, and runtime resource requirements are the big ones. And on domains that are not raw image processing, SVMs are still often quite competitive when it comes to accuracy.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Deep nets ate everyone's hype. The lunch is still there. SVMs have many advantages over ANNs that recommend themselves to practical applications still.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
to recite the rest of that refrain, Orient in particular is worth a look because they not only make some lovely stuff, but all of their movements are manufactured in-house.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
The BBC History Extra podcast has an interview[1] with Professor Roper about her new book (the subject of the article), and she more or less agrees with your statement about the likelihood of a Reformation with or without Luther, as does th
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by dmreedy 10y ago
I hate to sound like I'm defending facebook, because on instinct I'd agree with you. But I always have to be careful to remind myself not to underestimate the power of play as a driver of discovery. Feynman spinning plates and wha
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by dmreedy 10y ago
So, I disagree a little. The first-order problem is one of control, as you describe. The second-order problem is one of comfort with control, and the normalization that that entails. Once you accept a certain piece of automation, you tend a
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by dmreedy 10y ago
The classic, cliché-for-a-reason recommendation here is Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. It discusses a very tangible, very realizable, ground-up system of education built on the foundation of the computer as a universal, interactive tool th
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by dmreedy 10y ago
I think some of the most exciting and interesting work comes out of proving, not just capabilities, but constraints for systems, be it Gödel, Shannon, Aaronson, or any of the others in the smaller-than-desirable tradition of those who say,
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by dmreedy 10y ago
That quote, and its context, is not an argument that animals do not have exceedingly rich inner lives, nor is it an argument that language is some prerequisite for such a state. It is an effort to address, and dismiss, the kind of "17t
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by dmreedy 10y ago
I don't mean to understate or disrespect the scale of the task to which philosophers traditionally apply themselves; you're preaching to the choir there. But I do want to be careful not to inject too much mysticism into the pict
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by dmreedy 10y ago
I'm not sure I follow what you're railing against here. You're absolutely correct that none of the disciplines you've listed have been completely solved yet, and that they likely won't be any time soon. But I'm
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by dmreedy 10y ago
So, the only hunch I have is that there might be a kind of cryptographic/information approach to it. If you treat natural language as a noisy encoding of some underlying set of intents (whatever sentience is), then the question becomes
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by dmreedy 10y ago
Like most ticklish philosophical problems, I think it becomes less obvious the deeper in to the problem you look. There are a number of considerations at play here, and a long history of violently disagreeing about them. Is language tied to

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