jakecrouch

4 ms·

1.
by jakecrouch 8y ago
I view modern AI as a combination of things that are too early and too late - data science hasn't changed much since the 1990s, but people have a misconception that there is still a lot more to do in data science because of the undeser
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
Raising taxes is not the only way to improve public infrastructure. One can also lower the trade deficits, improve the technology the government uses, and legislate away some of the problems (jails would be less full if drug offenses didn&#
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
> Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of light. Pretty much nothing else is practical. What's your reasoning for this? You would only have to accelerate at 1g for 3 years to hit 99.5% of the speed
4.
by jakecrouch 8y ago
> But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don't write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible... this author still working on it...), speaking publicly. I would be careful
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
While this is a cool result, I wonder if the focus on games rather than real-world tasks is a mistake. It was a sign of past AI hype cycles when researchers focused their attention on artificial worlds - SHRLDU in 1970, Deep Blue for chess
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
One explanation of the inflation of the public and private markets in the US is that the Chinese are in the middle of a massive debt bubble, anyone with cash there has nothing good to do with it, so they've been willing to invest in th
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
It's nowhere near as bad or pervasive as the competition to get into student debt. But I'm not really sure what psychotherapy would work. Maybe convince people to read about mimetic theory.
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
It's worth noting that this basically gives you competitive tips - how to be more effective at solving a problem after it's been given to you. I think it's much more valuable to be good at recognizing important problems that
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
I believe that their problem will be finding the small group of users that derive enormous value from it. When you really dig into all the applications they've suggested, they don't quite make sense.
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
The book "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse" tells the stories of companies that suddenly collapsed due to hidden issues, like Enron and Worldcom. Tesla fits every sign: larger-than-life CEO with massive executive turnover, boar
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
I would be skeptical of new entrants to scooter / bike sharing. In China, ofo and mobike together captured about 95% of the market. If it were possible to challenge the companies that have reached scale, one would think one of the many
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
Lightsail Energy tried and failed to bring this to market - not sure whether this can ultimately outperform Lithium Ion Batteries, which have all the pressure of the electronics industry behind them.
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
I am interested in knowing if there are advantages to using blockchain generally outside of Bitcoin - I don't understand it in this case from reading the post. A centralized exchange could be fully transparent, publishing every transac
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by jakecrouch 8y ago
What is the advantage of using the blockchain rather than creating a fully centralized debt exchange?
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
This is a legitimate concern. The Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II are all spaced roughly 80 years apart, and all coincided with deleveragings.
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
There are many other parallels that can be drawn between the 1930s and the 2010s. Ray Dalio's theory about long term debt cycles explains this in a non-ad-hoc way - every 50-75 years an economy's debt becomes too high and must be
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
It's obvious that there are limits to how well machine translation can work unless the models have sensory grounding. I wonder if the problem is that people haven't figured out how to do sensory grounding or that the hardware is s
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
I'm somewhat uncomfortable with brain fixation because there is no way to actually verify that it works. Mind uploading is very far off if we still can't upload C. Elegans. It is more plausible that we would be able to test biolo
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
Perhaps this is the solution to the problem segways had, social acceptability. If it becomes mainstream among college students, it could easily spread to everyone else.
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
> And they call this a "product". To be fair, this is an absurdly competitive space. If they achieved something of similar magnitude for a problem dozens of other teams weren't already solving, it would seem much more impr
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
My theory is that the only reason the SEC hasn't classified all cryptocurrencies as securities is that doing so would be too unpopular politically. Anything that fails to get wide backing before the regulators hear about it, will get c
22.
by jakecrouch 9y ago
The best way to advance AI is probably to make the hardware faster, especially now that Moore's Law is in danger of going away. The people doing AI research generally seem to be fumbling around in the dark, but you can at least be cert
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
There is kind of a Gresham'a Law with these buzzwords, where if you actually have new and interesting ideas around them, it's much harder to get people to take you seriously.
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Introducing the Private ICO (PICO)(medium.com)
1 points by jakecrouch 9y ago|0 comments
25.
by jakecrouch 9y ago
This is why the US should not worry about China as a long-term economic threat - authoritarianism has never worked. The Soviet Union, 1930s Germany and Italy, all collapsed. I think the Chinese realize this and are pessemistic about their o
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
Tough question: How will this get distribution? How would I find out about it without reading Hacker News?
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by jakecrouch 9y ago
People at the top of our economy are generally oblivious to how bad things are for the bottom half. The top 0.1% commands the same wealth as the bottom 90%. Historically wealth inequality finds its outlet in political unrest, and there is p
28.
by jakecrouch 9y ago
Wealth inequality is the result of a debt bubble that's been growing for several decades, not technology. High household debt to GDP and wealth inequality probably coincide today for the same reason they coincided during the Great Depr