clvcooke

I'm sympathetic to the worries of a local population about being exposed to a nuclear disaster. The thought of radiation effecting you, your friends and family is horrifying.

Where I diverge from the article is the opinions of the anti-nuclear activists, where they say "It is time to bring nuclear energy to an end". I realize that nuclear power is scary and that this particular reactor may have a higher than average risk profile. However, where they lose me is the alternative. There, currently, is no viable alternative to nuclear that provides the same safety and econimic benefits, not to mention environmental pros of nuclear.

Simply not liking something is not enough reason to get rid of it. Who knows maybe a new, safer plant would have been built if they were allowed, but the people voted against it. I find this type of reasoning problematic, it has somehow become common (or I'm just realizing its happening) to rally against something without considering the alternatives that would have to replace it.

I was pretty excited to try this out (there is an online demo linked), however after some playing around I found the experience lacking. Not that things sounded _bad_ persay but that I found it incompatible with actually playing anything that sounded nice.

I think part of my disatisfaction is due to pattern recognition. As humans we recognize patterns EVERYWHERE, even when they don't exist. So what happens (or what I believe might be happening) is that I think I recognize a pattern, try to play a note to continue it, then the NN decides otherwise. Although the resulting sound may be nice to an outsider it breaks my internal model, making it sound "bad" to me.

I do however like the idea of augmenting insturments to make them easier to play, I'm personally guitly of having many potential songs in my head but not having near enough the skill to execute them.

I really like where this is going, it seems a bit rough around the edges right now (which is totally fine!) but functional enough to be useful. Really happy it's free, open source and offline first (I can just sync through Drive or Dropbox).

Couple thoughts on some exploring: - Webpage capture: seems that only links with `http` in front work, would be great to get resolving working nicer (say news.ycominator.com should work). Can't see this being a large issue as mostly I would copy paste from my browser, which keeps the http

- The "inspect element" menu in the editor seems a bit unnecessary, as I don't really think of PDFs as HTML. I guess this may be nice for some folks who are familiar with HTML but for me its a bit confusing.

- I managed to crash a page by highlighting a section and using the page down buttons(unsure exactly what caused this)

- I had some performance issues when resizing the page on a longer pdf (140ish pages), crashed and then wouldn't reopen until I restarted the application

As I said a bit rough around the edges still, but as you hopefully get more use these bugs/inconveniences will get ironed out. Excited to see this develop and great work!

The headline indicates that forgetting someone's name is bad, however the article treats that as forgetting someone entirely. I'm curious what the impact of the inbetween would be; that is "I remember I've met you before, but I can't remember your name".

As I cannot reply to squeegee5 comment I'll reply here:

So, because I don't have the right experience I shouldn't voice my opinion, in a way that suggests I am willing to be proven wrong? I never said I was correct, I said this is what I think and wanted to know what others thought. I never claimed to be qualified, I actually implied I wasn't. It seems you have more experience in this area than I, so I learned something from your comments. Again my issue with your comment isn't that you're telling me I'm wrong, its that you are telling me I am racist

Just citing one example, there are many reasons why I may or may not want to work in China. This one just came to mind first as it was a major reason one of my employers didn't do buisness there. The human rights abuses are a whole different bag of worms that I didn't want to get into here.

I have never thought of myself as understanding people well, so thats no surprise. I guess what was interpreted was that I said "Chinese people are not creative", rather than the more moderate "Authoratian governments do not foster creativity as well as Democracies, and this will harm their AI research". I dislike arguments being taken to extremes, and was hoping to gain insight into what other people thought on this topic, instead of being critized for "being borderline racist". Other commentors have succesfully critized my argument, and I love being shown I am wrong. But I expected more from this forum on not taking things too far.

So I cannot critize elements of a goverment style without being racist? I am not saying that "Chinese people are not creative", I am simply saying that I do not thing this style of government fosters creativity. And I am very open to that being wrong, however I would prefer (as other commenters of done well) to be shown counter examples to my belief and provided evidence. Telling my I am being racist for critizing a method of governance, of a county that the article is talking about is absurd.

There are many things that the Chinese government is fantastic at, for example energy. Their transition to green energy has been fantastic for both the industry and the planet as a whole, and I wish other governments would follow their example. If I critized the green energy policy of the American government would I then be anti-USA?

Generalizing and taking arguments to extremes is something I didn't expect on this forum and am dissapointed to have to respond to.

I think we have a lot to learn from the human brain still. I am continuosly fascinated by our ability to learn quickly and use previous experience to bootstrap learning. I think the next breakthrough has a high chance of being a collaboration between the neuroscience community and CS. What is really interesting about Hinton is his background, experimental pyschology.

My frame of reference is actually the Canadian education system, not the american one. I like to believe we are slightly better than the american's in terms of providing an better baseline education (this might be due to us being "socialist"). I do agree that both Canadian and American education has a lot to learn from China, however I think what you mentioned about courage is a really good point, and I guess maybe thats what I'm getting at. Thanks for the constructive point of view!

Thanks! I probably have a biased view so maybe I need to step back and look at what other people are saying. I'll look into Hoftede's research when I have the time.

I am very sorry if I came across that way at all. I have nothing against chinese people, I am talking about the government here. If this style was prevelant in, say Russia, or the USA I would hope I would have the same opinion. I could be wrong about the government, and thats totally fine, but please please do not think I am at all racist.

Perhaps I phrased my point wrong. To me critical thinking/creativity and questioning authority are all intertwined. I see those attributes being emphasized very strongly here (in Canada), and from an outsiders point of view, less strongly in China. I actually didn't think that Chinese students were mediocre at all, my intepretation was that China was exceptionally strong in science and engineering due to that social tendency that you mentioned.

Thanks for the reply, I guess we can agree to disagree on some points ha. I tried to keep my answer diplomatic and open to being told I was wrong so glad someone took me up on that :).

In terms of your question on education, I have only experienced Canadian education but I have never thought of it producing "factory drones" , exactly the opposite. Some of the most creative thinking I have seen has been in the classroom, with professors/teachers asking us to point out their flaws, or think of better answers than they presented.

I hadn't thought about talent pool and very good point. In my mind even if China did want to take advantage of this they may have issues due to their reputation (I for one would not want to live/work in china due to their blatent disrepect for IP).

Follow up: Do those people then get encouraged to continue to foster their creativity within the system? Does the government, upon seeing that someone "withstood" their education change their approach and allow them to continue to explore?

Although not explicitly what the report is focussed on, this resurfaces my, perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese style of eduation will prove unfruitful. As someone attempting to work in this field right now I intepret it as something that although on the surface is highly mathematical/statistical at its base still rests on critical thinking and creativity.

The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China. Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will. However, my personal experience working with it, and experimenting with improvement in my own small corner of applied science tells me otherwise.

Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad).

Edit: I don't want my comment on math to imply that there is no creativity within mathematics. I've gone through too many heavy math courses to believe that. I'm instead trying to say that there is a place, even beyond mathematics, for creativity and intuition, where you don't need the mathematical understanding to build something novel.

Perhaps life/health insurance? I'm not sure the average costs of injury associated with earthquakes but it could be substantial

I see your point, my mistake. However there are still many arguments to be made for this strategy. First of all, in terms of carbon capture it is much easier to capture carbon at a factory then on a boat, or any mobile vehicle for that matter. Secondly, arguing that diesel is equal is ignoring that diesel needs to be transported to and from the fueling station, and extracted from the ground, this should be factored into it's emissions (I'm not sure how). As far as I know moving electricity is far easier than moving liquid fuel, as long as you are in a preexisting industrial zone.

So I do agree, perhaps on a pure emissions standpoint they may be more equal than most think, however in terms of environmental impact batteries seem to be able to cater to technological advances (carbon capture and better manufacturing with scale) much better than diesel (which you NEED to burn to use).

I believe comparing engines to batteries is misleading. As you are comparing _capacity_ to _energy_, and although the units are the same the meaning is very different. The emissions to produce the initial capacity may be similar (200g vs. 250g), however those emissions are spread over the life of the battery (~1000 cycles). So ignoring power input (which is a bad assumption) batteries would be 0.2g/kWh vs. diesel at 250g/kWh. Of course ignoring power isn't fair, but it shows the manufacturing emissions are neglible compared to diesel engine emissions when spread over the batteries lifetime.

Edit: Power --> energy

Seems like they were launched around similar times (both came out in 2011) so that a definite possibility. However from what I know about Waterloo's design projects (as this was a final year design project) this project was most likely started in 2010, so technically amazon's locker came out later. Although who knows who copies who when things get released so close to each other.

Looks like Amazon picked up the buffer box [1] idea. Such a shame Google bought them and shut them down, it had such potential.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BufferBox

I forget where I read this (somewhere on HN most likely), but there is a major difference between what Google/Waymo is doing and their competion. It all goes back to the DARPA days; The waymo approach is a hybrid one, its terrain detection using LiDAR as well as visual based systems. To see and "understand" the environment using a mix of these technologies is very different than what, say Tesla is doing, which is using cameras to do what is basically advanced lane following (although it is still fantastic technology). I believe that its this dichotomy in approaches which causes what people interpret as Waymo falling behind, or well, not being as ahead as they once were. Many other companies are catching up using visual based systems, but I believe there is a wall they will hit, where they will need to go through a major iteration of their technology to match what Waymo is currently doing.

Nest actually recently moved....there are about 6 new buildings over two campuses, all in use.