mcswell

46 ms·

781.
by mcswell 5y ago
Or it could kill off only males (or only females). There is at least one SciFi story based on that premise.
782.
by mcswell 5y ago
There are at least two sci fi stories based on the premise of vacuum-creating quantum black holes. In one, ("The Hole Man" by Larry Niven) aliens left such a device on Mars. Astronauts discover it, and one of them manages to rel
783.
by mcswell 5y ago
Looks like you're being ignored, or at least no one (until me) has replied. I guess people would rather hear themselves think than look at what other people said a few years ago. But thanks for bringing up this link!
784.
by mcswell 5y ago
I'm sure it's koans like "Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the thing you can’t hear, and not bothering", or "Well, what I like best," and then he had to stop
785.
by mcswell 5y ago
I'm using Vivaldi, which is like Chrome but with a far better UI. It has a reader mode, which afaict does not help with the paywall at The Economist. Perhaps it's because if you pay for a subscription there, the full article is
786.
by mcswell 5y ago
No, the "only 400 syllables" refers to the syllables without taking into account tones. But tones are as much a part of Mandarin syllables as coda consonants; taking the tones into account, there are over 1200 distinct syllables.
787.
by mcswell 5y ago
Why, when there is only one possible answer to the next question, does it still insist on asking that question? Pick your departing port as Bainbridge Island and see what I mean.
788.
by mcswell 5y ago
While you're at it, bring Unix into the 21st century, in which we use Unicode (UTF-8 encoding). The number of Unix utilities that badly support Unicode is, well, painful to those of us who deal with non-ASCII data all the time.
789.
by mcswell 5y ago
I agree about your latter example, but about your first example: isn't it the case that these faulty AI systems for medical diagnosis have been rejected? Doctors don't like them because they don't want to be replaced or one-
790.
by mcswell 5y ago
I don't know anything about Chinese surnames, but their paucity cannot be due to a limited set of possible sounds. First, I would interpret "sounds" as phonemes (including tones), and there are far fewer of those than 400.
791.
by mcswell 5y ago
I don't know how it is in other fields; I'm a linguist, who made the transition to computational linguistics back when you had to be a linguist to be a computational linguist (the 1980s). Slow forward to statistical (and now neur
792.
by mcswell 5y ago
I don't think "Is NLP useful?" is the question they're trying to address. Hammers are useful, even in a world where there are lots of screws. NLP is useful, even in a world where there is lots of language (in English,
793.
by mcswell 5y ago
"If language processing has a universal basis, why all the confusing variety..." Because the universal processing mechanism provides lots of options for individual languages--the option for different words, obviously, but the opt
794.
by mcswell 5y ago
Neuroscience and brain imaging still don't tell us how language works--they're at a much to course level of granularity. Even if we could see every single neuron as it fired (which we can't), the volume of data would be over
795.
by mcswell 5y ago
"Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of." I've read a lot of Chomsky, and I don't recall him ever saying anything like this. Can you provide a citation? A
796.
by mcswell 5y ago
Translators may do so when they're acting as interpreters. I don't know for certain, but I doubt that most translators who are translating written documents do so.
797.
by mcswell 5y ago
I was going to say the same thing: There's no way facial expression software (not quite the same as facial recognition software) is un-biased. What unbiased ground truth could you possibly train it on? Answer: I don't think ther
798.
by mcswell 5y ago
I doubt the engineers can do a significantly better job, given the technology they have to work with; it's not their fault. Everyone could be tooling around in 60mpg Priuses, but they--the drivers--choose not to. (Disclaimer, I drive
799.
by mcswell 5y ago
Seems like it would make a lot more sense to focus on things that really use lots of energy. Focusing on sleeping computers is like a certain wise man said a couple thousand years ago: straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
800.
by mcswell 5y ago
None of this is the real reason. The real reason is that computers are known to the State of California to cause cancer. The other states in the list are just hitch-hiking, I guess.
801.
by mcswell 5y ago
I suppose if you could convert California into a rain forest, maybe they wouldn't have forest fires. Then they could run the power lines any which way, and everyone would be happy. Right? You ask how to convert it into a rain forest?
802.
by mcswell 5y ago
...and if you buy it outside the state?
803.
by mcswell 5y ago
Maybe if they didn't snore so much?
804.
by mcswell 5y ago
Don't worry, your R2 unit can fix it.
805.
by mcswell 5y ago
"if it was easy then everyone would be doing it": And, I suppose, we'd see them. Little green men, I mean.
806.
by mcswell 5y ago
Two fields which claim some degree of scientific approach which are probably (IMO) worse than psychology: political science and anthropology. I of course exempt my own field, linguistics, which is the most scientific of all. (Yes, that is
807.
by mcswell 5y ago
I'm pretty sure scrolling through social media raises my blood pressure.
808.
by mcswell 5y ago
In the Southwest US, houses are often roofed with tiles. In the rest of the US, with asphalt-treated shingles. Why? I guess tiles are heavier and therefore require heavier trusses, but other reasons?
809.
by mcswell 5y ago
And for Reasons, we make the vinyl look like wood.
810.
by mcswell 5y ago
Question: aren't lots of commercial buildings in the US built with steel (or aluminum??) studs? What are the advantages/ disadvantages? From observation, the metal studs are about the same size as a 2x4, but constructed like an

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