pjdorrell

13 ms·

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by pjdorrell 10y ago
My own thesis is that when modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed, they would have appeared uglier to our ancestors than they do to us - because we are no longer subject to selective pressure to avoid mating with Neanderthals. http:&#x2
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Also, the word "reported" got left out of the headline. Ie 93% of professionals _claim_ they are more productive somewhere other than their office.
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Headline says: "docker _in_ GitHub repo names" Story detail says: "using the registered trademark Docker as the _first part_ of a repo name" So imaginative name replacements like "wharfee" not necessarily requi
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
This is a bit like the beat "quantization" options in music apps, where you tidy up the raw user input. The best result comes when you choose not 100% quantized. The Pix app needs a slider so you can choose how much stabilisation
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Some the examples given in the article are about creativity in relation to art forms intended for human consumption. If I try to program a robot to create art that humans will appreciate, my robot has the disadvantage of not having immediat
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
My own theory of language acquisition and music: http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheState... . I don't assume any pre-existing "universal grammar". What I do assume is a pre-existing c
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
My own attempt to develop "manifestos" for the web is based on a concept of "Propositional Writing". The major characteristic of Propositional Writing, vs "normal" writing, is that the headlines are the primary
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
The reason for this type of password security theatre is that it maintains the fantasy world of purely human password management: 1. Every password only ever exists inside the brain of the user, or inside the password entry field in the UI
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
One hypothesis is that music has evolved to be "difficult" to compose, because too much really good music would be bad for us: http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Quote: "We don't want to bloat your apps with useless library code. However, there are exceptions to this." (I think the second sentence was intended to refer to the sentence that appeared before the two sentences that I&#x27
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Also, as a bearded programmer, can you please explain the benefits of going to GPLv3 instead of GPLv2?
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
I take this opportunity to re-advertise my own alternative approach to developing a scientific theory of music: http://whatismusic.info/ .
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Every now and then someone posts some humorous easily-digestible technical content to Hacker News and commenters say stuff like "All mathematics/science/software development textbooks should be written this way", and som
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
I described a similar theory of neuronal agency in 2005: http://thinkinghard.com/blog/HowDoesANeuronKnowWhatToDo.html .
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
One group of people will always want to access the open web on a large screen via a web browser running on a general purpose computer: software developers. If the web "dies", then the non-web will also die, or at least it won&#x27
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
FTSE 100 closes above pre-Brexit-referendum-result level
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The Security of Your Password Is Very, Very Important to Us (2013)(thinkinghard.com)
1 points by pjdorrell 10y ago|0 comments
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
My own attempt to deal with this issue (2013): http://thinkinghard.com/blog/UniqueFactorisation.html
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
In Quantum Field Theory, the concept of "the same water molecule" is not a well-defined concept, because of wave-function symmetry. (The only water molecules that are fully distinguishable are those where the isotopes of hydrogen
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
It's a _very_ particular environment, because it includes RNA replicase, which is a complex protein.
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Yeah, items 1, 3, 8, 9 and 10 are somewhat nonsensical (3 might need geometry, but it would be more about physics).
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
This article is like someone went to the "List of Fallacies" page in Wikipedia and turned it into an essay about how the brain is not an information processing system.
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
A related question (I think), is what counts as "impossible"? According to quantum mechanics, anything that is not prohibited by a conservation law is possible, with some non-zero probability. So we have to pragmatically redefine
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
One thing I learned from watching the transit on a YouTube livestream of someone else's telescope view (because New Zealand was in the no-see zone) is that YouTube livestreams have live commenting that works just as good or better than
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
Much of the charm of Periscope is the ability to watch different people doing and saying random stuff. I haven't yet watched a Facebook live video. Possibly this is because none of my Facebook "friends" has ever made a live v
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
He estimates f_l, the probability of life arising in a habitable planet, as 0.1. Abiogenesis has never been observed to occur independently of its presumed occurrence when life started on Earth. Given the current state of scientific knowled
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
When human composers attempt to compose original music, they have immediate access to their own subjective judgement of the quality of the music. Until such time as we discover an algorithm that replicates human taste in music, any AI-based
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by pjdorrell 10y ago
In the context of Many Worlds, a "universe" is an approximately classical wave function, where the degree of approximation is limited by the uncertainty principle. Even if you start with an approximately classical wave function, i
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by pjdorrell 11y ago
This story takes place in the USA, one of the world's most litigous countries. Surely someone can be sued for this.
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by pjdorrell 11y ago
One question I would like to ask, for each project, is: Will all journal publications from the project be published as Open Access Science? For every project, this question should be answered up-front.

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