I like spacing between my keys personally since it helps reduce mistypes. Also, if the action mechanism is good, then accidentally hitting the edge of a key shouldn't trigger a stroke, so a little spacing helps in those cases as well.
There are 4 things I find important in most keyboards I use. Travel, key face shape, spacing, and mechanism; in that order of importance for me. Travel and mechanism are closely related most of the time though, but mechanism affects the "feel of action-ing" the key and there is a lot of psychology in that I think. I find key shape is pretty important as well. On keyboards with flatter key faces, I tend to mistype a lot and and have trouble centering on the keys.
My favorite recent laptop keyboard is the MacBook Pros from around 2011 up till the most recent iteration. The new keyboards are horrendous. Ignoring the oversized trackpad, which I think is just ugly, the new keys have even less travel and the prior MBPs, which were pretty low to begin with but not bad. The scissors mechanism is also pretty mushy as a result.
If Apple could pair their key design with the old IBM Thinkpad (before Lenovo) keyboard mechanisms, then that would be the best of both worlds I think. The old Thinkpad keyboards had a really nice feeling and feedback, but the key design was horrible. They were bunched next to each other so mistypes were common and they were "hemispherical" instead of being pits that your finger went into.
The biggest thing most people complain about with the feasibility of Hyperloop is the vacuum seal. Musk has stated that in order to seal against the water table you have to have something good up to about 5-6 atmospheres. To go to vacuum or near vacuum you only need 1 atmosphere, so if they can seal to the water table, then they can seal to vacuum.
I think even Kurzweil's 2029 estimate is a bit optimistic. There might be researchers that have systems in place that are starting to brush up against the possibility somewhere around 2030, but I suspect it won't be permeating the market until about 2040-ish. We're struggling right now to grasp how these systems work, but what I think will happen is that someone will make a break through in our understanding of [wet] neural systems, probably in mapping and simulating, and we'll see tech advance rapidly.
As an example, someone might make a breakthrough in the late 2020s in mapping a brain the size of a pea in some animal and then simulating it. 2-3 years after that they map a brain a bit larger than a grape and can simulate it and a year after that its an apple. In parallel, the connectome project takes these advances and finally fully maps a human brain a few months after the 'apple' brain. At the same time, the people working with the pea and grape brain maps, haven't stopped trying to understand how to split the maps into chunks that are useful, and so by time the human map is completed, there is an understanding of how to separate out useful networks such as vision and semantic systems. Regular AI, which will have probably stalled in the mid-2020's will take this new info and adapt and finally be able fill in many of the short comings and a new wave of AI craze will start. I'd expect somewhere around the 2050-2060s we'd see the birth of an AI system that has the potential to grow into a singularity system.
It only takes one major breakthrough or idea, to start a wave of advances. It'll be slow at first but it'll pick up speed rapidly.
For everything in this package and the technology involved, I'm blown away by this price point. My original guess was that the HTC Vive was going to cost $1000 at launch. The lighthouses are a particularly complicated and likely expensive piece of hardware. From what I could gather from releases, they are using similar Laser mapping technology as can be seen on the Google Car. Because of this I was suspecting each lighthouse to cost at least $100-150 each.
If anything, this makes Oculus look really bad. The Rift is launching with a controller, built in headphones, a basic IR tracker (not laser), the HMD, and a dinky remote. The CV1 isn't even going to have the Touch controllers for a better experience included and those have to be purchased separately which I'm expecting to cost in the range of $50-100 which puts the Rift CV1 at a price around $700.
If we're talking about who we think might come out on top though. I think the Touch controllers on the Oculus are a better overall form factor and will fit better with the kind of games that benefit from a VR experience. The Vive controllers just seem about as clunky as the Playstation Move controllers. I think the HMD are probably going to be fairly similar in quality but I have a sinking suspicion that the Oculus might turn out better simply because of how much time they've put into the process. In terms of games, I think the Vive has a chance to come out way ahead since they have Valve's backing and because SteamVR is integrated right into Steam. Steam is going to provide a huge platform for indie devs looking to build experiences for VR. The big worry for anyone looking at getting the Oculus though will be whether Valve makes it a point to make sure the SteamVR releases are always up to date with the Oculus SDK or not. If they aren't, then the Vive will always be ahead of the Oculus and that's going to lock a lot of people out of potential games. The best example to date is Elite: Dangerous, which in terms of most up to date VR versions, only works on SteamVR with Frontier stating that they plan to support V1.0 of Oculus sometime in the future.
Taking all of this into consideration, I think overall Oculus stands the best chance of claiming VR on the PC. The Vive can do more I think, but the "more" that it can do seems almost "gimmicky" and not in tune with how I think most games will probably use VR (ie: sitting down). If we can get access to the camera on the Vive though, there are some potentially huge AR applications that the Vive can tap into that the Oculus just can't. All of the worries about the drivers/SDK will probably clear up after a year or two, and the Oculus has more room to come down in their price point as time goes on compared to the Vive which is probably tied down by the complicated lighthouse units.
Facebook/Oculus's goal shouldn't be recouping the 2B. What they need to do is shore up the VR market in their favor. They need developers to realize "they are the leader" in the market and focus their development on the Rift versus the Playstation VR or the Vive. With a $600 price point though, they are stretching it, especially if Sony or Valve decide that its better to take a loss on their units and undercut the Rift. If the win the VR war, then they'll eventually get that 2B back.
One of three outcomes is likely in the market.
1) Someone comes out on top and dominates the VR market due to the developers building all their games for that unit.
2) Everyone lines up behind an agreed upon standardization for VR which can the be used in an SDK everyone can use. In which case, multiple vendors can potentially be successful. This could also occur with different market successes, ex: Sony claims the console market and HTC/Valve has the PC market for VR. Assuming Sony is Sony and makes it so the Playstaion VR won't work on PC.
3) The market is just so fractured that VR dies a death like the Kinect.
I was talking to a friend about Oculus, Valve/HTC, and Sony; and we arrived at the decision that Oculus is probably going to get creamed in the VR industry. The main problem is that the unit is just too expensive and is coming to market way too close to other units that are coming. At $600, I may as well hold out and see what HTC and Sony have to offer here in 4-6 months when they come to market.
In the conversation, I also brought up the question of why didn't Oculus just take a loss on the first 10,000 units or so in order to bring the price down (I actually guessed that it would probably cost at least $600). As someone that was on the fence about buying a unit, $600 is just too much for me to spend when I know that in 6 months HTC or Sony will have their own unit out. The interesting revelation that me and my friend came to however, was the fact that HTC and Sony are in a better position to actually take a loss on their VR units compared to Oculus since they are actually backed by another platform that they can make money off of. To Sony and Valve, their VR unit is very similar to a game console, where they want to try and get as many adopters to buy into their system as possible so they can make money off of the games and peripherals that go along with it. So the smart thing for Sony and Valve to do now is to come out with a price now that is $200-$350 cheaper than the Rift, even if it means they have to take a loss on the first 10k units or so.
Personally I'll be holding out to see what HTC/Valve do since I want something that I know will work with the SteamVR SDK.
About a week ago, me and my friend had actually been discussing all the stupid business decisions that Mozilla has been making. Their OS and the Firefox Phone were two big ones that came to mind that just didn't make any sense to either of us. The money they have received, they've squandered on pointless pursuits into industries they stood no chance at making a dent in.
Seriously, what was the logic behind trying to get into the phone market in the first place? Other companies have tried just as well (Amazon, Microsoft) with little to no success. The thing that bugged us was the fact that they must have spent millions trying to do this which could have been more smartly invested to ensure that they didn't run out of money to support and improve the current products they know are/were liked (Thunderbird and Firefox). Now as result, we are left with them trying to find money streams to support Firefox, and most of this comes from pushing unwanted software and advertisement into Firefox.
but this encumbers human development indirectly - newcomers purchasing these games are gonna face cultural clash with them, since they weren't made for this point of time, especially their stories, while their genres, even despite a rework, will be out of place (time*)
It has already been stated by Square that the FF7 HD remake is going to undergo changes to the story. I expect the same thing to happen with many of their other games as well. Compared to older games though on the (S)NES, FF7's story is less in need of modernizing.
I never liked LiveCoding. I found out about this whole "watch people code live" thing from the article sometime back about/r/watchpeoplecode and the people on Twitch that were doing it. It was interesting way to see what people were doing and even landed me a part time job doing some freelance coding with someone on the side.
Somewhere around the time that/r/WatchPeopleCode was gaining some traction, LiveCoding seemed to pop up out of no where and started to aggressively try and recruit people that were streaming on twitch. They, or rather the primary founder it would seem, would "stalk" people (looking for their primary email contact, or hitting them up on social media) and constantly email them trying to get them to switch to LiveCoding. Some of the people that actually did try it out found themselves trying to be forced to stream on schedules. Apparently there was/is a spreadsheet that had time blocks that specified when they should be streaming. They weren't even asked if they wanted to participate in something like this.
LiveCoding has never been particularly user friendly for either the streamer or the viewers. I'm not sure if they've changed it now, but months ago, you still had to register in order to be able to see streams. This just drives away any one thats interested. The founder gave the excuse that this was due to bandwidth concerns or whatever. In addition, they set up focused advertising which would appear on/r/watchpeoplecode to draw people to their site. I always figured they were in this for the money, but I never saw the angle until now. I guess its try and get in on the freelance market or something.
John Conway is a genius. And the thing about John is he'll think about anything. He has a real sense of whimsy. You can't put him in a mathematical box.
I came to the same conclusion about him as well after having seen him in some of the Numberphile videos on youtube.
Hyperloop's biggest problem will never be engineering. It'll be the concerted efforts of the airline industry, the dated train industry, and the trucking industry; all coming down on any attempt to build a real life version connecting any two cities spanning 100s of miles. Even if the most conservative costs of freighting for the hyperloop were to double (from what I've read in the Hyperloop Org's huge PDF), it'd still be faster and cheaper than all the current means of transportation of goods. Nothing like the Hyperloop would get built easily if it stands to destabilize or even destroy these other industries.
There is a guy that wrote wrote an essay some years ago that suggested as much. He posited that drugs like psilocibin basically overload the brain and cause it to form feedback loops. Many of the effects you can experience on hallucinogens also suggest as much. Closed eye visuals for instance are basically the "lights" you see when you push on your eye balls. They are just amplified and put into a feedback loop. Thought loops are common on hallucinogens as well, I imagine its the result of that as well.
I agree with you on many points but I think technology has been moving in many ways to solve the problems.
On the issue of actual neurons vs ANN, I think issue 1 is probably going to be remedied by advances in memristors. The biggest issue I've seen in most ANNs has been the fact that the entire system is simulated with a single processor having to calculate every neuron, but small bunches of memristors could eventually do this for us and we'll be closer to an actual brain. See: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-b...
The issue of internal biology in neurons is a big unknown though. We know that cell biology has a big affect on cognitive ability. The real question though is how much of an affect it has on the actual processing capabilities. While many people are interested in human level intelligence, I think just being able to reach human level signal processing might bring us half way to where we need to be. In this case, the structure of the neural nets is probably more important than the careful interplay of cellular biology. Given a normal human, we can determine baselines for how different neural structures fire and then mimic those.
Regardless of what any of the articles say about the decision to do this, I personally believe the reason behind this is because Sony is bleeding money left and right. Sony has been selling off parts of their company for the past year now. It's no secret, Sony has been sinking slowly. They sold their mobile division, they sold their Vaio division, and probably came pretty close to selling their TV division as well, before thinking better of it and simply split it off into a new company. Now they are selling one of their big game studios. If Sony can't find a new market to be successful in, then I wouldn't be surprised to hear about Sony being bought by another company here in the next 3-5 years.
Another angle people need to keep in mind is that Texas is a prime target for a hyperloop in general. Some of the documents put out by the Hyperloop Transportation Technologies group, say that a loop between Dallas, Huston, and Austin would be very profitable. If the test track works then it could entice Texas to let them build a real one.
All this algorithm will accomplish is showing the personality that a person shows to Facebook. The reason why it can "better predict a person's personality than their friends" is because people have different personalities around others. I've known this since high school. I had many friends and when I hung out with some just 1-on-1 they were chill and quiet; probably because that's how I was. But if you got these friends together in the same car or the same house, they suddenly became loud, rambunctious, and prone to doing stupid stuff. This still holds true today. So people have different personalities or faces depending on the people they are around and I'm sure Facebook has its own unique "face" as well.
The sheer number of stars in the Andromeda photo is humbling. While panning through it, the thought struck me that perhaps around one of those stars exists a planet with intelligent life that might also be looking at a high res image of the Milky Way and be thinking the same thing about them.
It might be god from our perspective, but it might be a let down of a god in other ways. Consider this scenario.
300 years in the future we discover some way to simulate an entire universe easily within a computer. So we create one and let it run for billions of years inside the simulation till intelligent sentient life emerges. This life makes great strides, it goes to space, it advances, until one day we look in and decide to "pull one of the beings out." We pull the "mind of the being" out of the simulation and put it in a robotic body. Maybe at first its amazed at everything, we show it the world it lived in and the things we can do to the simulation; and for a short while it calls us god. But eventually the being realizes there are still things about this "outside" world we don't understand, and suddenly it comes to the realization that if I'm from a simulation what if they are too? Are they really god? Is the being on the outside of this outside god? It could be simulations inside simulations to infinity so long as the simulation (B) inside a simulation (A) can be done within the limits of sim A. We know nothing of the physical limitations of the simulation outside the one we are in.
The point is that we can never be sure the being we are talking to is actually "god" in the sense that we tend to think about it in religion and language.
This study is interesting, but I'm way more interested in the affect of conditioning and body temp regulation. I grew up in the US and all of houses/apartments always had good temperature control as well as ceiling fans in rooms. I got use to living in places where if the temperature was above say 70F, there was a fan running, the air in a room was circulating.
When I studied abroad in Japan and then moved there I discovered this wasn't the case and constructed a theory that early life conditions on body temp are 'imprinted' in a way. Japanese tend to let rooms run very hot. In the Summer/Winter rooms and trains are kept at about 28C maybe 30C (possibly higher in the winter), and I always found these miserable and always resulted in me sweating. I always noticed though that most other (Japanese) people never had this problem though, even in a room thats almost as hot as a mid-summer day in the winter, people would have 2-3 layers of clothes on and would be fine. I knew I wasn't alone either because in talking to other westerners living in Japan I learned that many of them had the same issue too. The only reason I've been able to come up with was that it had to do with how they were raised early on and the kind of temp. environment they are use to living in.
So I'd be curious to see if these physical effects in the study aren't something that isn't tuned by early conditioning.
I've participated in some TCS experiments back in college. Unless they discover some new way to do TCS there is no way anyone is ever going to find the technology usable in an entertainment environment. Remember that in order to cause the neurons to discharge magnetically you have to send a strong enough magnetic field through the skull and through a certain amount of liquid. In addition, the field has to be changed constantly as well.
For anyone that has never done TCS, what this effectively results in are constant static discharges on your scalp and this happens at a fairly rapid frequency. Plus, depending on the location of the magnets, the magnets might also be causing muscle neurons to discharge as well, so your face will be constantly twitching. All of this leads to a fairly tiring experience.
If you lived in Japan like I have, then you should know the answer to this.
1. Japan values customer service. Having a face be there to control the train or open/close the doors makes the service "friendlier." Also, if they removed the staff and made it automatic the old people would complain.
2. "Its how its always been done so why should we change."
I also get asked an awful lot (by the younger years) how I type so fast and how they can "learn" to type that fast. Type. For years. Bang, you've learned. This is no shortcut, there is little technique, no amount of learning the home keys will help you type fast. You just have to type, lots, all the time.
While this very true; it helps to also give them a place that requires speed to push them to type fast. I've always told people that asked "how do you type so fast?" that I learned to type really quickly by growing up in IRC chat rooms with lots of people and multiple conversations going on at once. You had to learn to type fast to keep up with what was going on.
Same for coding. You can learn some theory. But to learn to code, you have to code. And with kids it's really easy - pick a game, program it.
The only problem I've ever had with using "games" as a way to learn to code is that the final product may not match expectations. To put it another way. I love programming because it gives me a means to solve problems. Sometimes the problems are concrete as "I need a piece of software on my desktop to tell me when I'm getting a phone call on my phone." That problem is focused, the solution is focused too. If your phone rings and you get a notification on your computer, you know you solved the problem.
Games rarely offer up focused problems and solutions, especially for beginning programmers. A lot of game ideas are nothing more than "I want to make an RPG where I fight zombies." The solution would deceptively be to have a few characters in a bland world and some monsters labeled zombies, but game dev is never that simple and the problem space "grows." It goes from "rpg zombie game" to "rpg zombie hunting game where I must build a cure, save cities, and all while I'm working within this cool battle system." Games could be a great route to code but the path between problem definition and solution is huge compared to more simple stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I like spacing between my keys personally since it helps reduce mistypes. Also, if the action mechanism is good, then accidentally hitting the edge of a key shouldn't trigger a stroke, so a little spacing helps in those cases as well.
There are 4 things I find important in most keyboards I use. Travel, key face shape, spacing, and mechanism; in that order of importance for me. Travel and mechanism are closely related most of the time though, but mechanism affects the "feel of action-ing" the key and there is a lot of psychology in that I think. I find key shape is pretty important as well. On keyboards with flatter key faces, I tend to mistype a lot and and have trouble centering on the keys.
My favorite recent laptop keyboard is the MacBook Pros from around 2011 up till the most recent iteration. The new keyboards are horrendous. Ignoring the oversized trackpad, which I think is just ugly, the new keys have even less travel and the prior MBPs, which were pretty low to begin with but not bad. The scissors mechanism is also pretty mushy as a result.
If Apple could pair their key design with the old IBM Thinkpad (before Lenovo) keyboard mechanisms, then that would be the best of both worlds I think. The old Thinkpad keyboards had a really nice feeling and feedback, but the key design was horrible. They were bunched next to each other so mistypes were common and they were "hemispherical" instead of being pits that your finger went into.
Pimax: World's First 8k VR
It's been reviewed by a number of outlets already, so its not vaporware, though it has a few issues.
The biggest thing most people complain about with the feasibility of Hyperloop is the vacuum seal. Musk has stated that in order to seal against the water table you have to have something good up to about 5-6 atmospheres. To go to vacuum or near vacuum you only need 1 atmosphere, so if they can seal to the water table, then they can seal to vacuum.
I think even Kurzweil's 2029 estimate is a bit optimistic. There might be researchers that have systems in place that are starting to brush up against the possibility somewhere around 2030, but I suspect it won't be permeating the market until about 2040-ish. We're struggling right now to grasp how these systems work, but what I think will happen is that someone will make a break through in our understanding of [wet] neural systems, probably in mapping and simulating, and we'll see tech advance rapidly.
As an example, someone might make a breakthrough in the late 2020s in mapping a brain the size of a pea in some animal and then simulating it. 2-3 years after that they map a brain a bit larger than a grape and can simulate it and a year after that its an apple. In parallel, the connectome project takes these advances and finally fully maps a human brain a few months after the 'apple' brain. At the same time, the people working with the pea and grape brain maps, haven't stopped trying to understand how to split the maps into chunks that are useful, and so by time the human map is completed, there is an understanding of how to separate out useful networks such as vision and semantic systems. Regular AI, which will have probably stalled in the mid-2020's will take this new info and adapt and finally be able fill in many of the short comings and a new wave of AI craze will start. I'd expect somewhere around the 2050-2060s we'd see the birth of an AI system that has the potential to grow into a singularity system.
It only takes one major breakthrough or idea, to start a wave of advances. It'll be slow at first but it'll pick up speed rapidly.
For everything in this package and the technology involved, I'm blown away by this price point. My original guess was that the HTC Vive was going to cost $1000 at launch. The lighthouses are a particularly complicated and likely expensive piece of hardware. From what I could gather from releases, they are using similar Laser mapping technology as can be seen on the Google Car. Because of this I was suspecting each lighthouse to cost at least $100-150 each.
If anything, this makes Oculus look really bad. The Rift is launching with a controller, built in headphones, a basic IR tracker (not laser), the HMD, and a dinky remote. The CV1 isn't even going to have the Touch controllers for a better experience included and those have to be purchased separately which I'm expecting to cost in the range of $50-100 which puts the Rift CV1 at a price around $700.
If we're talking about who we think might come out on top though. I think the Touch controllers on the Oculus are a better overall form factor and will fit better with the kind of games that benefit from a VR experience. The Vive controllers just seem about as clunky as the Playstation Move controllers. I think the HMD are probably going to be fairly similar in quality but I have a sinking suspicion that the Oculus might turn out better simply because of how much time they've put into the process. In terms of games, I think the Vive has a chance to come out way ahead since they have Valve's backing and because SteamVR is integrated right into Steam. Steam is going to provide a huge platform for indie devs looking to build experiences for VR. The big worry for anyone looking at getting the Oculus though will be whether Valve makes it a point to make sure the SteamVR releases are always up to date with the Oculus SDK or not. If they aren't, then the Vive will always be ahead of the Oculus and that's going to lock a lot of people out of potential games. The best example to date is Elite: Dangerous, which in terms of most up to date VR versions, only works on SteamVR with Frontier stating that they plan to support V1.0 of Oculus sometime in the future.
Taking all of this into consideration, I think overall Oculus stands the best chance of claiming VR on the PC. The Vive can do more I think, but the "more" that it can do seems almost "gimmicky" and not in tune with how I think most games will probably use VR (ie: sitting down). If we can get access to the camera on the Vive though, there are some potentially huge AR applications that the Vive can tap into that the Oculus just can't. All of the worries about the drivers/SDK will probably clear up after a year or two, and the Oculus has more room to come down in their price point as time goes on compared to the Vive which is probably tied down by the complicated lighthouse units.
One of three outcomes is likely in the market.
I was talking to a friend about Oculus, Valve/HTC, and Sony; and we arrived at the decision that Oculus is probably going to get creamed in the VR industry. The main problem is that the unit is just too expensive and is coming to market way too close to other units that are coming. At $600, I may as well hold out and see what HTC and Sony have to offer here in 4-6 months when they come to market.
In the conversation, I also brought up the question of why didn't Oculus just take a loss on the first 10,000 units or so in order to bring the price down (I actually guessed that it would probably cost at least $600). As someone that was on the fence about buying a unit, $600 is just too much for me to spend when I know that in 6 months HTC or Sony will have their own unit out. The interesting revelation that me and my friend came to however, was the fact that HTC and Sony are in a better position to actually take a loss on their VR units compared to Oculus since they are actually backed by another platform that they can make money off of. To Sony and Valve, their VR unit is very similar to a game console, where they want to try and get as many adopters to buy into their system as possible so they can make money off of the games and peripherals that go along with it. So the smart thing for Sony and Valve to do now is to come out with a price now that is $200-$350 cheaper than the Rift, even if it means they have to take a loss on the first 10k units or so.
Personally I'll be holding out to see what HTC/Valve do since I want something that I know will work with the SteamVR SDK.
About a week ago, me and my friend had actually been discussing all the stupid business decisions that Mozilla has been making. Their OS and the Firefox Phone were two big ones that came to mind that just didn't make any sense to either of us. The money they have received, they've squandered on pointless pursuits into industries they stood no chance at making a dent in.
Seriously, what was the logic behind trying to get into the phone market in the first place? Other companies have tried just as well (Amazon, Microsoft) with little to no success. The thing that bugged us was the fact that they must have spent millions trying to do this which could have been more smartly invested to ensure that they didn't run out of money to support and improve the current products they know are/were liked (Thunderbird and Firefox). Now as result, we are left with them trying to find money streams to support Firefox, and most of this comes from pushing unwanted software and advertisement into Firefox.
but this encumbers human development indirectly - newcomers purchasing these games are gonna face cultural clash with them, since they weren't made for this point of time, especially their stories, while their genres, even despite a rework, will be out of place (time*)
It has already been stated by Square that the FF7 HD remake is going to undergo changes to the story. I expect the same thing to happen with many of their other games as well. Compared to older games though on the (S)NES, FF7's story is less in need of modernizing.
I never liked LiveCoding. I found out about this whole "watch people code live" thing from the article sometime back about /r/watchpeoplecode and the people on Twitch that were doing it. It was interesting way to see what people were doing and even landed me a part time job doing some freelance coding with someone on the side.
/r/WatchPeopleCode was gaining some traction, LiveCoding seemed to pop up out of no where and started to aggressively try and recruit people that were streaming on twitch. They, or rather the primary founder it would seem, would "stalk" people (looking for their primary email contact, or hitting them up on social media) and constantly email them trying to get them to switch to LiveCoding. Some of the people that actually did try it out found themselves trying to be forced to stream on schedules. Apparently there was/is a spreadsheet that had time blocks that specified when they should be streaming. They weren't even asked if they wanted to participate in something like this.
/r/watchpeoplecode to draw people to their site. I always figured they were in this for the money, but I never saw the angle until now. I guess its try and get in on the freelance market or something.
Somewhere around the time that
LiveCoding has never been particularly user friendly for either the streamer or the viewers. I'm not sure if they've changed it now, but months ago, you still had to register in order to be able to see streams. This just drives away any one thats interested. The founder gave the excuse that this was due to bandwidth concerns or whatever. In addition, they set up focused advertising which would appear on
John Conway is a genius. And the thing about John is he'll think about anything. He has a real sense of whimsy. You can't put him in a mathematical box.
I came to the same conclusion about him as well after having seen him in some of the Numberphile videos on youtube.
Hyperloop's biggest problem will never be engineering. It'll be the concerted efforts of the airline industry, the dated train industry, and the trucking industry; all coming down on any attempt to build a real life version connecting any two cities spanning 100s of miles. Even if the most conservative costs of freighting for the hyperloop were to double (from what I've read in the Hyperloop Org's huge PDF), it'd still be faster and cheaper than all the current means of transportation of goods. Nothing like the Hyperloop would get built easily if it stands to destabilize or even destroy these other industries.
There is a guy that wrote wrote an essay some years ago that suggested as much. He posited that drugs like psilocibin basically overload the brain and cause it to form feedback loops. Many of the effects you can experience on hallucinogens also suggest as much. Closed eye visuals for instance are basically the "lights" you see when you push on your eye balls. They are just amplified and put into a feedback loop. Thought loops are common on hallucinogens as well, I imagine its the result of that as well.
I agree with you on many points but I think technology has been moving in many ways to solve the problems.
On the issue of actual neurons vs ANN, I think issue 1 is probably going to be remedied by advances in memristors. The biggest issue I've seen in most ANNs has been the fact that the entire system is simulated with a single processor having to calculate every neuron, but small bunches of memristors could eventually do this for us and we'll be closer to an actual brain. See: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-b...
The issue of internal biology in neurons is a big unknown though. We know that cell biology has a big affect on cognitive ability. The real question though is how much of an affect it has on the actual processing capabilities. While many people are interested in human level intelligence, I think just being able to reach human level signal processing might bring us half way to where we need to be. In this case, the structure of the neural nets is probably more important than the careful interplay of cellular biology. Given a normal human, we can determine baselines for how different neural structures fire and then mimic those.
How is this different from Akka?
Regardless of what any of the articles say about the decision to do this, I personally believe the reason behind this is because Sony is bleeding money left and right. Sony has been selling off parts of their company for the past year now. It's no secret, Sony has been sinking slowly. They sold their mobile division, they sold their Vaio division, and probably came pretty close to selling their TV division as well, before thinking better of it and simply split it off into a new company. Now they are selling one of their big game studios. If Sony can't find a new market to be successful in, then I wouldn't be surprised to hear about Sony being bought by another company here in the next 3-5 years.
Another angle people need to keep in mind is that Texas is a prime target for a hyperloop in general. Some of the documents put out by the Hyperloop Transportation Technologies group, say that a loop between Dallas, Huston, and Austin would be very profitable. If the test track works then it could entice Texas to let them build a real one.
All this algorithm will accomplish is showing the personality that a person shows to Facebook. The reason why it can "better predict a person's personality than their friends" is because people have different personalities around others. I've known this since high school. I had many friends and when I hung out with some just 1-on-1 they were chill and quiet; probably because that's how I was. But if you got these friends together in the same car or the same house, they suddenly became loud, rambunctious, and prone to doing stupid stuff. This still holds true today. So people have different personalities or faces depending on the people they are around and I'm sure Facebook has its own unique "face" as well.
The sheer number of stars in the Andromeda photo is humbling. While panning through it, the thought struck me that perhaps around one of those stars exists a planet with intelligent life that might also be looking at a high res image of the Milky Way and be thinking the same thing about them.
It might be god from our perspective, but it might be a let down of a god in other ways. Consider this scenario.
300 years in the future we discover some way to simulate an entire universe easily within a computer. So we create one and let it run for billions of years inside the simulation till intelligent sentient life emerges. This life makes great strides, it goes to space, it advances, until one day we look in and decide to "pull one of the beings out." We pull the "mind of the being" out of the simulation and put it in a robotic body. Maybe at first its amazed at everything, we show it the world it lived in and the things we can do to the simulation; and for a short while it calls us god. But eventually the being realizes there are still things about this "outside" world we don't understand, and suddenly it comes to the realization that if I'm from a simulation what if they are too? Are they really god? Is the being on the outside of this outside god? It could be simulations inside simulations to infinity so long as the simulation (B) inside a simulation (A) can be done within the limits of sim A. We know nothing of the physical limitations of the simulation outside the one we are in.
The point is that we can never be sure the being we are talking to is actually "god" in the sense that we tend to think about it in religion and language.
This study is interesting, but I'm way more interested in the affect of conditioning and body temp regulation. I grew up in the US and all of houses/apartments always had good temperature control as well as ceiling fans in rooms. I got use to living in places where if the temperature was above say 70F, there was a fan running, the air in a room was circulating.
When I studied abroad in Japan and then moved there I discovered this wasn't the case and constructed a theory that early life conditions on body temp are 'imprinted' in a way. Japanese tend to let rooms run very hot. In the Summer/Winter rooms and trains are kept at about 28C maybe 30C (possibly higher in the winter), and I always found these miserable and always resulted in me sweating. I always noticed though that most other (Japanese) people never had this problem though, even in a room thats almost as hot as a mid-summer day in the winter, people would have 2-3 layers of clothes on and would be fine. I knew I wasn't alone either because in talking to other westerners living in Japan I learned that many of them had the same issue too. The only reason I've been able to come up with was that it had to do with how they were raised early on and the kind of temp. environment they are use to living in.
So I'd be curious to see if these physical effects in the study aren't something that isn't tuned by early conditioning.
I've participated in some TCS experiments back in college. Unless they discover some new way to do TCS there is no way anyone is ever going to find the technology usable in an entertainment environment. Remember that in order to cause the neurons to discharge magnetically you have to send a strong enough magnetic field through the skull and through a certain amount of liquid. In addition, the field has to be changed constantly as well.
For anyone that has never done TCS, what this effectively results in are constant static discharges on your scalp and this happens at a fairly rapid frequency. Plus, depending on the location of the magnets, the magnets might also be causing muscle neurons to discharge as well, so your face will be constantly twitching. All of this leads to a fairly tiring experience.
If you lived in Japan like I have, then you should know the answer to this.
1. Japan values customer service. Having a face be there to control the train or open/close the doors makes the service "friendlier." Also, if they removed the staff and made it automatic the old people would complain.
2. "Its how its always been done so why should we change."
Suits are uncomfortable to wear, you can't ride with a bicycle to work wearing a suit,
It's clear you've never been to Japan. Dudes ride to work on bikes in suits all the time. Of course, they aren't expensive tailored suits.
I also get asked an awful lot (by the younger years) how I type so fast and how they can "learn" to type that fast. Type. For years. Bang, you've learned. This is no shortcut, there is little technique, no amount of learning the home keys will help you type fast. You just have to type, lots, all the time.
While this very true; it helps to also give them a place that requires speed to push them to type fast. I've always told people that asked "how do you type so fast?" that I learned to type really quickly by growing up in IRC chat rooms with lots of people and multiple conversations going on at once. You had to learn to type fast to keep up with what was going on.
Same for coding. You can learn some theory. But to learn to code, you have to code. And with kids it's really easy - pick a game, program it.
The only problem I've ever had with using "games" as a way to learn to code is that the final product may not match expectations. To put it another way. I love programming because it gives me a means to solve problems. Sometimes the problems are concrete as "I need a piece of software on my desktop to tell me when I'm getting a phone call on my phone." That problem is focused, the solution is focused too. If your phone rings and you get a notification on your computer, you know you solved the problem.
Games rarely offer up focused problems and solutions, especially for beginning programmers. A lot of game ideas are nothing more than "I want to make an RPG where I fight zombies." The solution would deceptively be to have a few characters in a bland world and some monsters labeled zombies, but game dev is never that simple and the problem space "grows." It goes from "rpg zombie game" to "rpg zombie hunting game where I must build a cure, save cities, and all while I'm working within this cool battle system." Games could be a great route to code but the path between problem definition and solution is huge compared to more simple stuff.