ewjordan

22 ms·

151.
by ewjordan 10y ago
Whatever you're doing, if you're honest with yourself, are you really doing something new and interesting every day/week/month, or are you just digging deeper into what you already know? I've found that without st
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Sure, and I probably shouldn't have glossed over that. That sort of research is definitely progress, though it's not paradigm shifting in any way. I do think that we are getting past perception slowly but surely, I just don't
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by ewjordan 10y ago
If there are five equally inexperienced applicants in the wings that will get along with everyone without having an attitude-smackdown first, then that's absolutely a reason not to hire them. The worst problems I've ever seen on t
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by ewjordan 10y ago
I'm as bullish on AGI as anyone in the medium term, but deep learning is not even playing the same game as AGI, let alone in the same ballpark or having the potential to achieve it. Deep learning is still mere perception. It doesn&#x27
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Structure is not the same thing as information. One is accidental, even if useful, amd the other has to be "designed". People arguing about the complexity of the human brain (especially those that know a lot about the way it works
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Over the years I've seen many more unmaintainable atrocities caused by diligent adherence to these principles than I ever have because of ignorance of them. All the horrid Java libraries that we hated working with 10 years ago were cre
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Fair point. For all my whining, I use both Git and Linux every day, they are incredible pieces of technology, especially compared to what came before.
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by ewjordan 10y ago
People have already mentioned it, but since I made the original comment, I'll pile on and say that Mercurial was (well, still is , but it's out of fashion now) awesome. It matches Git on most axes and blows it out of the water wh
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Yep, Mercurial's the one. It's a shame that it lost the war, they actually seemed to care about providing a good experience to their users. There are, of course, a few technical differences between it and git, but I personally nev
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by ewjordan 10y ago
"Not the friendliest of beasts" is putting it mildly. Git is basically Linus in a nutshell: abrasive, unforgiving, and behaving like an absolute asshole to any non-expert struggling user. Sure, engineers should probably get to kno
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by ewjordan 10y ago
That's a bit of a knee-jerk, I think. Men are referred to as "male software engineers", because "men software engineers" sounds absolutely ridiculous. The asymmetry you're thinking of is when people refer to
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by ewjordan 10y ago
See http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/images/2-9-chart2.png A large number of the people that made up the 3x growth in IT between 1990 and 2000 are just about to hit 40 now. That's a very rough m
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by ewjordan 10y ago
"Ask them what error rate they get on MNIST or ImageNet" While I agree that Numenta probably doesn't have any sort of full-fledged AI, the human brain does terribly on MNIST and ImageNet compared to the state of the art. So
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This video shows the hard work that went into a 2-second 'Firefly' GIF(dailydot.com)
1 points by ewjordan 10y ago|0 comments
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by ewjordan 10y ago
I've mostly seen it pushed (as a hard 100% policy, at least) by well meaning but naive people that have done it a few times before, got obsessed with it, and decided it's this week's cure for everything. The reality is, it w
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by ewjordan 10y ago
The solution to that is pretty simple: vote not guilty, and refuse to budge. If you need any clarification, the prosecution has not done their job. In a criminal trial, you're not there to figure out what happened, you're there to
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Oh, they use them. The problem is that each philosopher has a different precise definition that they feel is natural and matches what we "really mean" when we ask deep questions. Since most arguments and conclusions are phrased fu
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Your point is spot on: people should always know what they're worth when they negotiate salary at a job, asking for what you can get is the most crucial thing when taking a job. Both men and women are uncomfortable negotiating up (I&
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by ewjordan 10y ago
This is one of the reasons Unity has become so popular in the industry - from a project management point of view, it makes sure that programmers don't start yak-shaving and building tech that's already been built a thousand times
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by ewjordan 10y ago
All of those things being "better" include an implicit "...in the context which these best practices were studied" which usually means large teams of just-OK programmers writing Java code that mostly doesn't need to
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Humans are neither immune to No Free Lunch, nor able to predict Perlin noise.
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by ewjordan 10y ago
For the true laundryphobe, you can buy socks in bulk for less than a dollar a pair. Just wear a new pair every day and throw them out when you're done. I don't actually do this, FWIW, but talking about it is a fantastic way to a
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Yep, there are a lot of innovations, and plenty that people are holding back as well. None of it involves the word "deep", it's all just bog standard 1980 style nets with tweaks.
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by ewjordan 10y ago
FWIW, I'm in no way suggesting that evolutionary strategies are the way forward in the search for AGI, though I suppose they might be part of the solution. My 95% bet is that a random or evolutionary search might be how people optimize
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Actually, as a great fan of what has come out of the current deep learning hypefest, I'd question whether "deep" really matters. Most of the great successes have resulted from medium depth nets using the same shitty backprop
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by ewjordan 10y ago
I nodded along with pretty much everything you said, so I think we're arguing different points but not necessarily disagreeing. I agree, evolution's scale is colossal, but restrict your view to the tiny bit of the evolutionary mac
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by ewjordan 10y ago
No, we don't even need to be very clever: evolution is no better able to evade weak local minima than any but the dumbest search strategies humans use, and it quite easily discovered a neural algorithm that lead to intelligence when sc
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by ewjordan 10y ago
This is a late reply because I missed this until now, but if you accept the typical parameters of a statistical thought experiment, you should assume that the permutations are equally likely. The real world nastiness of biology and society
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by ewjordan 10y ago
"...the existence of the self, a subject that’s still scientifically unsettled." Shit like this, philosophers, is why scientists don't (and can't, and shouldn't) engage. The words to use are "scientifically und
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by ewjordan 10y ago
Like tempestn noted in another comment, enumeration is straightforward for small families, and makes it crystal clear that for any family size N, boys and girls have the same average number of brothers: Gender: B G # brothers: 0

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