adityab

That is a beautiful metaphor. Thank you!

This is nonsense; Travis employees are the polar opposite of "codebros".

Lighthearted team profiles are absolutely not an insight into the employees' "mentality". If anything, your insinuations are in extremely bad faith and you should know better than to slander people you don't know, especially those whose livelihoods got snatched away.

Very lazy and bad stereotyping, 0/10 points, try again.

Yes, you're not alone. Oddly enough, it's been repurposed to mean something akin to value alignment or strategic cooperation. It used to mean thoughtful kindness, and this change seems to have suddenly happened in the last five years.

It's usage now makes me vaguely uncomfortable because it feels borderline sociopathic or manipulative.

The line will be drawn between class boundaries.

Actually the new finding is similar to weight normalisation for individual neurons. LRN would be similar to another thing called lateral inhibition.

Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but puns sure are the puniest.

Looks like they want to avoid changing gameplay as much as possible.

Considering their focus on preserving even minute details of game dynamics... I wish they'd made an exception for pathfinding - the algorithm in the original AoE is extremely bad.

In particular, I really wish they'd introduce some improved ways to command groups of units. IIRC the Rise of Rome expansion introduced double-click group selection of all similar units, so it's not without precedent. If they change nothing else, my number one wish would be formations like in AoE II. I can't stand the way units just swarm like ants when told to move together.

To be precise, there exists a subset of facts that supports a narrative of epistemological nihilism.

Rather common in Indian English from what I've seen.

I don't get it, wouldn't building this be pointless after the Sophon interference jinxed everything?

You raise a good point. My answer is:

I understand the idea of doing probablistic inference about people based on their demeanor. We do it all the time with our minds, indeed many aspects of society and culture are built around non-verbal communication.

I'm okay with how things currently are, because we are innately capable of learning behavior policies for social interactions, while preserving a lot of cognitive privacy. In other terms, you can consciously control your demeanor (as the word is currently understood).

I afraid of inferences drawn from sub-conscious demeanors and involuntary information leaks.

Normal humans will not be able to tell if someone is nervous or afraid or angry just by looking at them, if that someone wants to maintain a pokerface. But it is entirely possible to read someone's pulse by recording a video of their skin, thus taking away some privacy of the mind [1].

We haemorrhage a lot of information all the time. As far as I know, current polygraph tests are trash, but I would be unsurprised if some characteristic features were to be found in a video+audio stream of someone's face that would estimate with good accuracy and precision that they were lying.

We all lie. To others and to ourselves. Within limits, lying is an integral part of healthy life. A world where I cannot casually lie is not one where I can live in; cognitive privacy is important.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/

I loved how in Arrival, they build a statistical model to map between concepts in the two languages, ostensibly via a joint embedding space.

They don't elaborate on it in the movie, but I could totally see such ideas being explained with style (and tense background music) in future sci-fi films about AI. Make it as banal as possible.

True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche.

Clarifications by well-known researchers don't travel as far and wide as urgency-signaling clickbait...

This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh.

But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields.

I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action against evil scientists before it's too late.

There are genuinely bad things that could come of such reporting. Like knee-jerk regulations being imposed on AI research due to irrational fears, or worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally.

It's not practical to educate everyone in ML, I wonder how we will solve this problem.

Don't ask people to prove a negative.

I would have been fine with Aadhar if

- They didn't rely on fingerprints, as they are easy to fake, without a high degree of technical sophistication

- There would not be an API for commercial services

I just want the government to be able to provide its services smoothly. I don't want random startups leaking or selling everyone's data.

I don't know what kind of world you live in, where you cannot believe that people can take a principled stand about a policy. Why can I not worry about my family's data being shared free-for-all by random startups that use their "Open API"?

Not everything is about X team vs Y team.

Finally any Indian in USA simply has no right to criticize Aadhar since the US Visa process requires biometrics from all visitors.

This is BS because getting a visa is a conscious choice, Aadhar is forced upon India's residents. You're attacking people for having an opinion that's contrary to yours.

About your other points - no one is denying the benefits of having a strong unique ID system that lets people interface with government services; the problem is that Aadhar has no safeguards for privacy - which you would've focused on had you bothered to read the article.

I disagree.

Titles exist to provide an assurance to people that the services they get from title-holders will be above a certain standard, with the threat of a serious penalty if the work is sloppy.

This is the social expectation in many societies.

If I find that a doctor doesn't sterilize needles or wash hands, they should face a penalty (regardless of whether it actually caused damage). We shouldn't have to specify up-front in some contract that we want them to follow $RULES as a set of deliverables. This stuff is therefore regulated.

I used to think differently, but now I feel that software engineers should be similarly regulated. That doesn't mean everyone will now have to follow a ton of regulations to slap together the next nodejs app, those people can still be called developers. But whoever is an "engineer" should ensure that the work is well thought-out and should stop the developers they supervise from moving fast and breaking things.

It's time the industry "grew up" as a whole. If "software is eating the world", we need to be damn sure it's not sloppy.

For what it's worth, in Germany the title of Engineer is regulated and the correct term for those who write software (which goes in the contract) is "Software Entwickler" (Entwicklung means "development"). There's a few more complications here that I don't know very well.

I don't completely agree with this because serious engineering work on software happens in many industries. But most software jobs clearly do not fit the description nor the implied seriousness of an engineering role.

Other things that grind my gears:

1. The way the "Data Scientist" title is casually thrown around for those who are neither scientists nor know statistics. Everyone has a different idea of what the term means and (worst of all) feel that it probably applies to them.

2. "Tech" is a contraction for technology but people in the software industry (especially Americans) seem to use the term solely for Software.

Don't worry, you're doing fine.

There are a multitude of political opinions out there (which does not mean they are bad ideas), and a large number of people who like to criticize others based on this because they get to feel superior. Such people also think that everything (including the personal) is political and make no distinction between the intentional and unintentional.

It's wise to just ignore them when the criticism is tangential. One only has finite mental bandwidth for these things, there is no way to cover the full combinatorial explosion of things that _could_ be interpreted as offensive.

Not everyone spends their time constantly thinking about the degree of unnecessary gendered-ness of every piece of information they encounter.

Maybe you should stop shoving politics (no matter how well intentioned) into everything.

The point of my comment was that getting good testing is surely easier on humans than monkeys. Actually going in has to happen at some point - why not do this on humans that have volunteered?

1. Humans do volunteer and it does happen, but even with full consent, regulations will always be stricter on human experimentation than on animals.

2. We don't understand the brain very well and it is easy to make mistakes when working with neural tissue. The consequences of causing irreversible damage/death are much higher when the brain belongs to a human being. On the other hand, most people eat animals for pleasure.

Cellular level investigations are obviously important but getting a wire in somewhere is not going to happen at a level this small

It does happen, there exist small electrode array implants that can be placed in neural tissue to both induce (for example, cause sensations that one can feel) and read-out activity. Such implants are in fact used in some human subjects (there are issues such as development of scar-tissue however).

A decent MR DTI can help when you want to know where the fibres go, but as you say, the hardware/software division isn't quite so clear with live things.

Yeah, for neural interfacing a connectome is not enough, you need to work at the neural code level. Reading out each spike with full spatial resolution from a distance will probably never happen.

Believe me, neuroscientists do not enjoy the fact that invasive experimentation has to be performed on blameless animals; unfortunately it has to be done, unless people are willing to live with the level of understanding/treatments we have now and never move forward.

Computational Neuroscience student here.

Research of this nature requires reading the electrical spike trains of small sets of neurons (often even individual cells).

EEG will give you a measurement of the combined electric field of every single neuron that is active in the entire brain. You can use multiple electrodes and run machine learning algorithms to get a qualitative measure of a macroscopic chunk of brain activity. So, terrible spatial precision.

MRI gives you anatomical information.

fMRI gives an idea of blood flow in the brain (about millimeter precision which is also not good enough) which is a time-lagged (a few seconds) _response_ to sustained neural spiking in a region.

Think of it like this: The brain is a computational organ where there is very little hardware-software separation. We're not going to be able to patch the software (say, to treat paralysis) without patching the hardware (say, with implants)

How do you suggest one should observe neural activity?

It's already well understood that we can interface with nervous system, this is nothing new.

Ok, let's not do anything then because actually putting this understanding to use involves touching actual brain matter and seeing what works.

Agreed. They don't make niche devices anymore.

The last great phones for me where the N950 and N900.

Everyone is building what they think appeals to the "average consumer". With every yearly product iteration, features regress more towards the mean. They just build bricks that look the same now, competing with each other on how many fractions of a millimeter can be shaved off. This is because phones are no longer seen as productivity devices, they're a status symbol like cars and jewelry. A keyboard increases thickness, which would be unthinkable for them.

I actually invested in a Jolla phone two years ago, but the promised hardware keyboard never quite panned out.

You should watch Max Tegmark's talk "Connections between Physics and Deep Learning" if this interests you [1].

Additionally, a paper that has everyone excited about deep connections between the mathematical analysis of physical systems and the hierarchical feature learning paradigm speaks of the connection in terms of the Renormalization Group [2].

Regardless of it's practical utility, the philosophical implications do tickle the intellect. On a dreamy note, I wonder if it would be possible to draw Category-theoretic parallels between some physical theories and statistical learning theory. There is so much to learn, and I am trying my best to teach myself (on the side) the mathematics that they don't teach in my CS grad school. So much to learn, such little time. :)

[1] https://youtu.be/5MdSE-N0bxs

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831

It's not as straightforward a distinction as you imply, and certainly not grounds for attributing a lower value.

In Europe (Germany in particular), you have to do a 2-year Masters degree which tends to be ~1.3 years of coursework and ~0.7 years of research culminating in a thesis.

Judged by the quality of your thesis, you then try to get accepted into a group for a PhD which takes 3 years on average.

In the US you go straight to a 5-year PhD program and within that, the coursework-research duration split is similar to what you find in Europe.

More and more, I find the current generation of far-left and far-right almost indistinguishable in their methods.

IMO, claiming that someone suffers from "internalized opression" is simply this new left's version of the "cuck" slur.