vonnik

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271.
by vonnik 7y ago
This article basically makes Gary Marcus's argument, and the argument is getting a bit tired. Geoff Hinton puts it more succinctly than I could: https://twitter.com/tabithagold/status/1070736319901519876 htt
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by vonnik 7y ago
Native Montanan speaking here. I think the Montana equivalent to YC's "build something people want" is "build bars where people live." To do the opposite makes for a lot of slow afternoons.
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by vonnik 7y ago
I happen to love this quote: 'If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.' -Heinrich Heine
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by vonnik 7y ago
I'd just like to point out that University of Wisconsin's German department has been putting out great German learning material for about 100 years now. If you're lucky enough to live in a university town with used book store
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by vonnik 7y ago
There's a lot of interesting research focused on this problem space, training algorithms toward a more flexible problem-solving ability. Here are a couple: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.09725.pdf https://
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by vonnik 7y ago
There's a famous Charlie Russell painting of a dying cow from the winter of 1886-7, a version of which is here: https://www.nps.gov/grko/learn/historyculture/winter.htm
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by vonnik 7y ago
Strange side note: A friend of mine knew Bloom, and one of Bloom's favorite books was Little, Big, by John Crowley. Bloom said he saw parallels between the 2016 election and the second coming of Barbarossa.
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by vonnik 7y ago
"Ignore advice" is not good advice. Even for startups. There are so many predictable ways that founders screw up. I, personally, have committed most of them. A few of them I avoided, or stopped doing soon enough to survive, and o
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by vonnik 7y ago
For #1: I second the recommendations for Nielsen, Goodfellow and Chollet. For #2: Pedro Domingos and our wiki: https://skymind.com/wiki/
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by vonnik 7y ago
there's significant movement in the platforms, fwiw. 6d is one example. https://www.6d.ai/
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by vonnik 7y ago
In the American West at least, trees go up in flames every few years. Turning hemp into products people don't burn might be a better way to sequester carbon.
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by vonnik 7y ago
With email, the deeper problem is that you can't force everyone you correspond with to leave Gmail. So your private correspondence will continue to be scanned to feed the ad-surveillance machine regardless. This is a problem common to
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by vonnik 7y ago
This is a huge issue. A family member spent two weeks in the hospital last year, and one of the hardest parts of that experience was how difficult it was to sleep there. The light, the noise, the demented patient shouting in the next room,
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by vonnik 7y ago
I'd just like to point out that Navy pilots are not privy to all US government programs to build new flying objects. Some of those programs are secret.
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by vonnik 7y ago
Social media networks are the cigarette companies of the mind. Like Altria (which owns Philip Morris etc.), they exploit an addiction, but it's a behavioral addiction, and therefore less visible.
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by vonnik 7y ago
It's probably worthwhile to point out that the trend toward remote work poses real risks to remote workers by increasing their physical isolation. I work at a remote-first company, and I've worked remotely for other organizations,
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by vonnik 7y ago
The weird thing about Gary Marcus's constant critique of deep learning is that the most prominent researchers in the field actually agree with him (and are doing something about it), yet he casts himself as a maverick, and that plays w
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by vonnik 7y ago
Years ago, someone said something about what we were building that I've never forgotten: "Anyone smart enough to use this isn't dumb enough to need it." Those were the words that come to my mind everytime I see stuff lik
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Wall Street reckons with climate risk(axios.com)
2 points by vonnik 8y ago|0 comments
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by vonnik 8y ago
Thanks! And I guess the point I wanted to make is that there was no insulation up there. No modernization had been done. The whole thing was just wood and rock: think San Francisco in early 1906.
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by vonnik 8y ago
This was from watching a SpaceX launch last year, fwiw: https://medium.com/@chrisvnicholson/we-watched-a-rocket-leav...
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by vonnik 8y ago
About 11 years ago, I climbed to the top of the spire of Notre Dame. It was not a place open to the public. (Although this is true, I find my own story hard to believe, so I will understand if there is skepticism.) We were drunk and it was
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by vonnik 8y ago
Can confirm: long posts that you update as new knowledge surfaces actually work well. Think of your site as a wiki.
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by vonnik 8y ago
I wrote a similar piece a few years ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-03-07/investors... There is no hedge against the apocalypse. But some people will create enormous shareholder value during
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by vonnik 8y ago
Writing a column for a newspaper four times a month is a thankless job, and almost always makes the writer appear vapid. Because they are writing for the calendar, instead of for the news. When you look at the NYT's other columnists: F
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by vonnik 8y ago
This is really interesting. It reminds me a bit of peer-reviewing journalism via Web annotation: https://web.hypothes.is/ I have a couple comments to make as a former newspaper reporter: * Many important stories use anonymo
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by vonnik 8y ago
That's Sweden
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by vonnik 8y ago
Randall Munroe of XKCD experimented with this in his book Thing Explainer: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
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by vonnik 8y ago
Having worked on a farm, I can confirm that chickens are unsympathetic and occasionally cannibalistic, especially when large numbers live together. (We had one case where eggs were getting eaten, and discovered the culprit one day with yolk
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by vonnik 8y ago
Someone at the New York Post can die now with the knowledge that their life work is complete: https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1093723253934309376

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