aptsurdist

Photo or it didn’t happen. In serious, I was sad there wasn’t a photo or at least discussion of the scale and details of the project.

Just one idea for making a positive impact while meeting amazing communities of folks: Invest in early stage climate startups (and not just software ones). They’re struggling and they’re building stuff that we’ll desperately need to survive.

To be fair, the Bible’s authors also seemed to have hallucinated the word of God. At least in cases of contradictions between authors.

This gets at the heart of the problem. It doesn’t produce the wrong tokens. The tokens are right. It’s the data that was “wrong”. Or at least it was weighted “incorrectly” (according to the judge living outside the data with their own context they decide is true)

If you feed AI conspiracy theories and then it tells you Elvis is still alive, that’s an input problem not an algorithm problem.

Now, getting to an AI that doesn’t “hallucinate” is a little more complicated than simply filtering out “conspiracy theories” from data, but IMhO it’s not many orders of magnitudes away. Far from insurmountable in a couple Moores law cycles.

I think human brains operate on the same principal of divining next tokens. We’re just judging AI for not saying the tokens we like best even though we feed AI garbage in and don’t tell AI what it should even care about. “AI doesn’t live here” it wasn’t born “here.”

Someday soon we’ll probably give AI guard rails to respond considering the context of society (the programmers version of society), and it will probably hallucinate less than most humans.

Human brains are also just picking tokens tho. A beautiful illusion of insight and thought in the chaos noise of information. But out of the chaos, the emergence of thought is real. It’s just not exclusive to humans.

I mean… even magicians (mentalists) can reliably hack humans into generating the next token they want you to generate.

But humans also hallucinate.

And humans habitually stray from the “truth” too. It’s always seemed to me that getting AI to be more accurate isn’t a math problem, it’s getting AI to “care” about what is true - aka better defining what truth is- aka what sources should be cited with what weights.

We can’t even keep humans in society from believing in the stupidest conspiracy theories. When humans get their knowledge from sources indiscriminately, they also parrot stupid shit that isn’t real.

Now enter Gödel’s incompleteness Theorem: there is no perfect tie between language and reality. Super interesting. But this isn’t the issue. Or at least it’s not more of an issue for robots than it is for humans.

If/when humans deliver “accurate” results in our dialogs, it’s because we’ve been trained to care about what is “accuracy” (as defined by society’s chosen sources)

Remember that AI “doesn’t live here.” It’s swimming in a mess of noisy context without guidance for what it should care about.

IMHO, as soon as we train AI to “care” at a basic level about what we culturally agree is “true” the hallucinations will diminish to be far smaller than the hallucinations of most humans.

I’m honestly not sure if that will be a good thing or the start of something horrifying.

I love the mention of gravity storage here. The potential of gravity storage is very real, but you need a lot of weight and a lot of height to achieve meaningful amounts of electricity. And at large scales of weight and height it becomes a surprisingly hard problem. For example, a steel cable can’t stretch much further than a mile under earth gravity before it succumbs to its own weight. But there are other solutions. It’s not rocket science, as they say.

Thanks so much for this link, I started listening and I immediately love it.

I found this fascinating! I found some 3D models claiming to be exact replicas, and I found it VERY interesting to note that the largest hole appears to be an ELLIPSE and not a circle? Can any verify this and has anyone heard a theory about that? If it is indeed an ellipse that of course immediately makes me wonder if it represents an orbit or some other mathematical or geometrical shape. Super fun.

https://www.shapeways.com/product/S3YNU5MNR/super-accurate-r...

I’m sure Trump is thrilled about this since Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter who fund raises for him.

I think what actually happened is that no candidate won enough votes, so a runoff is required.

"The National Electoral Commission (NEC) declared a runoff after none of the 16 presidential hopefuls on the March 7 ballot paper secured the 55% needed to secure an outright victory."

http://www.africanews.com/2018/03/15/sierra-leone-presidenti...

There was another thread commenting on the usage of the term "chick" and how it can be interpreted as derogatory. I agree that this term can be derogatory because it can be condescending. The commenter who took offense was flagged, and nested replies derided the commenter for taking offense. I am really disappointed to see the hacker news community unable to appreciate the nuance of this discussion. I know this term was not meant to be offensive, but that is not the point. It's important to challenge ourselves to think about these subtle issues. Our prejudices affect our language, and our prejudices are perpetuated by our language. Let's not flag and ban this discussion when it arises.

Class action lawsuit?

How is it okay that this information is even available from Experian in the first place?

I don't think anyone opted in to this. And I don't think there is any obvious way to opt out.

And Experian is not just some data tracking company watching your behavior on a website; they're supposed to be protecting our credit system. Do they obtain some of this information through special privileges because they're a pseudo-official credit score agency? If so, is this grounds for a class action lawsuit?

(As others have argued, this data is legally available through Experian, it just normally isn't free. https://www.experian.com/assets/dataselect/brochures/consume...)

One of the most fascinating aspects of the video is that the thing rotates.

As others have noted, the camera is auto-centering the object. If you look at the object's movement relative to the clouds in the background, it seems that the object might be turning and exposing its broader side to the relative direction of travel as seen from the camera. And then slowing down in the plane as viewed from the camera.

Note, this movement is relative and it's very hard to get a sense of perspective. So rather than slowing down, this could be the object banking and changing direction to move towards or away from the camera?

Maybe it's just a foreign aircraft with some kind of wingless shape like the B-2 bomber? I can't find a good source, but it seems there are blogs talking about new foreign stealth drones that could look like this. (http://defence-blog.com/news/new-stealth-bomber-spotted-in-c... -- not sure if this source is legit)

P.S. This is all assuming that this is indeed some kind of flying thing and not some kind of mirage.

I was initially very excited to see this post. I have always believed that flattr's subscription/contribution model could be so important for supporting creatives and grassroots efforts.

So I'm disappointed that it seems I can't signup and contribute without installing a browser plugin that can read and change all my browser data and browser history... nope.

Flattr team, please fix that and I'll consider giving you another chance.

P.S. I've been keeping my eye open for someone trying to implement this subscription/contribution model using blockchain. I haven't been able to find anything -- anyone seen that yet?

Yup, totally is! My friend James who is a fantastic illustrator inked that one for us.

Thanks! The website itself is not really active, we put it up just for fun. But the community is active. We have a slack channel where we chat, share work, ideas, and support. And we plan happy hours and events. If anyone is interested in working with us feel free to send portfolios. Here's our linkedIn project page, though only a few of us connected our accounts to it so far. https://www.behance.net/Raptorsaur/members

I would recommend finding a group of freelancer friends so you can build a community and share projects between each other. This is a fun group my friends and I started http://www.raptorsaur.com/ it's been fun. If you don't know people in your area yet, go to some meet ups and ask people how you can help with their projects. Good luck!

Yeah do it! I say it's totally realistic. I followed a similar path as I didn't really learn software development until after college, and it has turned into a great career for me. I would recommend starting with javascript, mostly because you can do so much with it so quickly. Here are some javascript related tips:

Learn some js fundamentals, but I would learn jQuery at the same time and write some fun code as you go to keep things interesting. This site's good for a quick start: http://jqfundamentals.com/. Or if you want the textbook approach: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805531.do This should also be a great read, though I've only read snippets so far: http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-JavaScript-Ninja-John-Resig/dp...

Once you get going, one of the coolest things about learning javascript these days is that it's never been easier to spin up a toy project powered by free out-of-the-box services like https://www.firebase.com/ or https://www.parse.com/.

The other advice I'd give is that, while I wouldn't go too far to play down the importance of learning to code through formal education, I think you can completely teach yourself since you have the passion for it. I'd say do a combination of the two as it fits you. Because at the end of the day, the most valuable thing you can have on your resume is that you've built some cool stuff. And if you're excited about learning to code, you'll find yourself building cool stuff in no time. Well - okay, "no time" really means a lot of hours of reading and coding, but you'll get addicted really fast so it'll feel like no time :) Anyway, good luck!

I just want to say a sincere thank you for writing this. I hope the whole community will read this with an open mind and understand how important it is to be conscious of these subtleties.

If you really are afraid of peaceful civil protest in the USA, I'd say that's all the more reason why we have a responsibility to practice peaceful protest now before things get worse.

I know this post might feel like old news at this point. But over the past weeks I've felt compelled to try to put these ideas into words. I think the dynamics of the OWS movement are hard to understand, and though it took me weeks to finally get around to finishing this post (I've been really busy), I really wanted to take a stab at thinking it through. I'd love to hear any feedback from you all. Regardless of political views, this is a historic event and I don't want to live through it thinking only what the media tells me about it. Thanks -

Wow, that's pretty brilliant. I wish it actually worked. At least it would make a great parody though - it would be cool to start a fake business front to go about suing patent trolls for infringing on your patent trolling patent just to raise awareness about the insanity of it all.

I love this guy Steve Lambert. This is the 3rd time in my life I've coincidentally stumbled across something that he made and I'm delighted every time. I used to love his radio show. Witty dude - gotta remember to keep an eye out for that guy.

Thanks - I've been wanting something like this. One feedback idea would be to let me close the stay-on-top window with the keyboard instead of having to clicking the x or the eyedrop icon. It'd be great if hitting escape closed that window... so the workflow would be command-shift-p, get the color I want, then close the window with escape. Thanks for the app -

I think the point of that statement was just that the data isn't transmitted through walls.

I appreciate that, but I'm not saying I want to be apathetic. It just seems that we should think of something better than a letter. I wouldn't write a letter to an engineer asking them to "please not make the building collapse." I don't have a strong view about how they do it, I just want them to not screw it up. Maybe that's naive of me, but we all have tough jobs to get done around here in this world, and it's not someone else's job to tell us to take responsibility for our actions or inactions when we screw up something that harms people.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see why it's my job to write to my senator or congressperson merely to tell them to do their job. I believe this is serious. But I'm looking for a more tangible action than writing an empty letter.

What if we made a website where we voted on a "default default", that is - if we collectively voted on a proposal that should go into effect if they haven't arrived at a compromise that they like better?

Good tutorial. I recommend checking out this version http://jqfundamentals.com/book/ which is basically a prettier version of the home page. Weird that it isn't linked to from the home page.

Some alternative album covers that are hopefully a show of support for Baio. Copyrights: kind of screwed. http://aptsurdist.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/a-story-by-waxy-o...