randcraw

67 ms·

841.
by randcraw 6y ago
No, not serious. But it's a fun thought experiment. And since it was written by an astronomer, it's no surprise the perspective is more about how we would deal with changes outside ourselves rather than within. Frankly, I would
842.
by randcraw 6y ago
Pharma may be the intended target for the signaling work, but as a data scientist who works in pharma, I can say with certainty that no biologist or chemist here would entertain for a minute any model that can't explain its mechanisms
843.
by randcraw 6y ago
It’s not meaningful to compare SHRDLU with today’s verbal search interfaces. The world SHRDLU manipulated were only stackable blocks and the only relations it knew were ‘above’ and ‘below’. The entire scope of its endeavor was describing
844.
by randcraw 6y ago
No, and not even close. Text cannot model many things. Try learning surgery using a textbook without pictures. Try driving a racecar competitively or learning a foreign language after only reading a book, even one with pictures. Models
845.
by randcraw 6y ago
Because it is possible to invent or imagine new things without resorting to endless random walks or blind trial and error. Induction isn’t probabilistic. It’s the origin of all discovery and based in sussing out what’s important in pattern
846.
by randcraw 6y ago
The premise of the article is that the human brain's 7+/-2 short-term memory rule should govern how software is designed. That's the silliest thing I've read in a long time. Unlike a sequence of random numerals, software
847.
by randcraw 6y ago
> It does everyone a disservice to spread exaggerated fear. And so does poo-pooing risk when you have no actual numbers. Every infectious disease expert I've heard from is puzzled by this disease. The variance of individual outcome
848.
by randcraw 6y ago
Tomorrow you have a .0001% chance of dying. Care to increase that to 1%? (E.g. walking through a bad thunderstorm.) Or 10% (Walking through a battlefield or in the middle of a busy superhighway.) Then are you willing to live with that
849.
by randcraw 6y ago
Navigating dorms often requires close contact (elevators, dining halls, shared bathrooms, shared rooms). Social gatherings in near-campus bars, fraternities, and on campus parties will invite infection, as party events at various summer ho
850.
by randcraw 6y ago
US state universities have been very risk averse for more than 30 years now. Try to buy or even consume alcohol on campus these days. The story was very different before about 1990, when inebriated students wobbled about campus undeterred
851.
by randcraw 6y ago
Political screeds like this do not belong on HNN.
852.
by randcraw 6y ago
A better film than "Jobs" is the documentary "Steve Jobs Man in the Machine", free to see at: https://www.documentarymania.com/player.php?title=Steve%20Jo... Mentioned in the CNN doc is the trick Jobs pl
853.
by randcraw 6y ago
I too. If a name is unfamiliar to me, even if it's no more than 5-6 letters long, I can't for the life of me recall it. But I can remember random sequences of numerals up to length 12. Why? I wonder if there's some term fo
854.
by randcraw 6y ago
I think RFS' loss is a little deeper than ablation of a contiguous block of symbols, since characters and numerals aren't likely to be represented sequentially in the brain they way they are on keyboards or ASCII. I agree with yo
855.
by randcraw 6y ago
I think software professionals' problems go deeper than biased perceptions of management that undervalue experience. Unlike other forms of engineering, software hasn't developed the same feedback-driven processes to ensure efficia
856.
by randcraw 6y ago
Usually it frees up the prior instructor to a) teach a more advanced course or one that's closer to their research interests rather than teach the same beginner level course over and over, or b) conduct research, which is why most tier
857.
by randcraw 6y ago
Cross check the OP ranking of 3 months of ownership against that of Consumer's Reports, which tracks car reliability over a decade. The two orderings differ enormously, likely because: 1) A car with fewer options/features has few
858.
by randcraw 6y ago
The OP goes into some detail on the essentialness of honesty and integrity when it comes to inquiry. Without both, your pursuit of deep understanding will short-circuit. The best way I know to overlook truth is to willfully presume you kn
859.
by randcraw 6y ago
Mac Finder - It hangs at least every other day -- the pinwheel of death. - It sorts files in some sort of weird non-alphanumeric order. - There's no way to cut and paste a set of files. You have to copy them TWICE, once to an intermed
860.
by randcraw 6y ago
I agree, except instead of 'mediocre' I'd use 'competent'. As long as technical wizardry doesn't add significant value, or it isn't essential to the business, most companies would rather not pay for it. T
861.
by randcraw 6y ago
I've seen LOTS of beautiful code that doesn't work... in the real world, usually because it doesn't check the assumptions it makes. Is the data what is expected? Do the code's parameters span the space they should? Do
862.
by randcraw 6y ago
Some historical context... IEEE 754 (the current floating point standard in H/W and S/W) arose in 1985, only 6 years before this paper. Before that, floating point representations were often proprietary (e.g. Cray or IBM). Back
863.
by randcraw 6y ago
And fortunately, it's easy to understand the mechanism of action that explains the positive impact of masks: the primary means of covid spread is virus conveyed not individually but in large water droplets. Any filter that impedes th
864.
by randcraw 6y ago
Tesla has millions of miles of experience with a level 2+ self driving system. Waymo has comparable experience with a level 4 system. Thus it makes no sense to claim that Tesla is closer to shipping a level 5 self-driving car than Google.
865.
by randcraw 6y ago
A camera-based self-driving autopilot is also capable of driving without hesitation straight into an overturned truck on a sunny day less than a month ago: https://www.autoblog.com/2020/06/01/video-tesla-model
866.
by randcraw 6y ago
Public speech has long been limited by law: slander, libel, sedition, public nuisance, public safety, violation of NDA, violation of gag orders, indecency, and more. Your argument is only that no amount of hate speech is too much. But I s
867.
by randcraw 6y ago
But that reduces the term to be meaningless. Unless you attempt to draw a line between what is and isn't hate, you cannot address it by law or even in discourse. If we want less of it, first we must define it. Only then can we draw a
868.
by randcraw 6y ago
Reasoning by analogy is akin to modeling. A model is presumed to capture a sufficient number of principal components that by permuting those, you can usefully predict the behavior of the target system. That said, I agree with you. IMO, sy
869.
by randcraw 6y ago
Free speech != hate speech. There's a big difference between stating a reasoned point of view that some might find offensive and stating something that's intended only to offend. The first is essential to a free society and dese
870.
by randcraw 6y ago
I'd feel a lot safer if the feeds from all those security cameras could not be abused -- like inaccurate face recognition that is shared by Google's doorbells with local police departments, like state driver license photo database

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