Hmm, hand-wavy tone, entirely unlike Wikipedia. What could possibly go wrong?
Populations collapsed from their Roman and post-Roman levels.
Wikipedia:
The prolonged and escalating Byzantine–Sassanid wars of the 6th and 7th centuries and the recurring outbreaks of bubonic plague (Plague of Justinian) left both empires exhausted and vulnerable in the face of the sudden emergence and expansion of the Arabs.
Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
To add a tiny dollop of credibility to that long personal screed, the game I played most was unusual in that while you would normally be pursued by two dozen soon-to-become claustrophobic objects, probably 15 of those objects would have a future trajectory that was deterministic based on your own movements (one little Z80 can only do so much...)
I actually don't know any other game of that intensity where you can glance away from your present task with such relentless foresight.
There was another game a few years later with about sixty objects in constant pursuit—amid a veritable blur of fireballs and grenades—but they tended to clump together, and you could settle for blindly taking out any three of five, before glancing back to assess the precise statistical mechanics.
Eye management was a valuable skill in many games I played later, but only these games rewarded it quite so ruthlessly as described.
It's not just shiny object affliction. This chick apparently has a stack depth of 1.5 items.
Even after fifteen consecutive distractions, I still usually know I left the kettle on.
To begin with, I have about a five-task planning horizon. This isn't even a stack. On a good day, I can be actively pursuing three tasks in parallel, while sizing up two more off to the side (and maybe grabbing utensils soon to be needed, if in my other flurry I discover them near to hand).
I originally learned to do this playing too many arcade games in my early twenties. I played one game with two joysticks for so many hours, that my cognition perceptibly split in two. I became completely aware of one planning horizon for navigation (mostly evasion, some targetting) and a separate planning horizon for aggression (the weapon stick) and some kind of mutual constraint optimization going on between these (this sometimes in the heat of the moment fell by the wayside, and my two hands would simply continue to function independently, each hand sort of making guesses about what the other hand might do—there was often a point in those old arcade games where the game would decide you had already played long enough, and it was time to terminate you with extreme prejudice; often I managed to beat the game nevertheless, but good luck keeping both hands on a fully coordinated, shared page for the death-defying duration; this was back during the Miller's Crossing "ethics" phase, where game designers felt obligated to give you a real chance, however slim).
I also have a sleep disorder, and regularly in the thick of my sleep disorder, my elite, simultaneous planning horizon shrinks down to a single task (or portion thereof). Damn is that annoying. And there's this voice that follows me throughout the whole day: "You know what? If you had your real brain, you'd have dunked that basketball three times just on the way to the bathroom to take a piss. And today you haven't managed to dunk that basketball even once in the past hour, sitting in your work chair, occupied with nothing else."
And I go, "thanks for the vote of confidence; and, oh yeah, ba da bing for reminding me where I was heading just now".
On the squirrel front, I have a somewhat different problem than the chick of the moment. My verbal intelligence is like Uncle Buck. Once he enters the room, it's very hard to send him packing again so I can return to working on math or code: 300 immobile lbs of curtain-ring Velcro. Consequently, I've also subjected myself to this kind of sad self-chaperonage, but for a different reason: to try to keep my word-brain at bay for long enough to accomplish other things.
Ideally, I would get through three two-hour blocks by mid-day and that would be the end of my technical obligations. But even ten minutes of Rachel Maddow (is the world still here? huh? is it? huh?) while I consume my morning coffee and jot a few notes in my journal is sometimes enough to compromise my entire morning. My squirrels are mainly verbal notions; they are generated internally, from the very first meagre sign of a toasted bread crumb, all the way until the sun goes down.
When I was feeling up for it, I used to sometimes cook a five course meal, with five unfamiliar recipes, selected from an unfamiliar cuisine (one time it was Korean, another time some country in Africa), involving maybe a dozen unfamiliar ingredients, while aiming to serve all of these dishes hot more or less at the same time. Usually I managed four, while shunting a problem child into "maybe tomorrow", or "maybe next time". Which should make it obvious why I clipped the following paragraphs on first encounter:
"Always be on top of your game, she says. "If your industry is becoming more digitally focused, get schooled on specific skills. Instead of being lax about your career, always stay ahead of the curve, keep your resume in circulation, ask yourself where the industry is headed and most importantly where you and your skills fit in."
Welcome to the 2020s, where having a job is a job.
It always goes like this. Whatever the Chicken Littles of the world are screaming about don't exactly come to pass, but something else changes, and not for the better.
The sordid underbelly of stagnant wages? Now you're working even harder in the margins to maintain your claim on the same dollar. This is yet another form of outsourcing to the employee, and I bet you can't even claim your office space at home devoted to all this "job upkeep" as a valid tax write-off.
Yet you are now 20% revenue-zero independent contractor, just to keep your day job in good standing.
In The Big Short the two young guys explicitly state that their business model is based on the observation that people prefer sunny thoughts, so they bet on big payoffs when sunny thoughts mushroom cloud (while loosing small when daisies reign).
The movie doesn't have a collar wad at Goldman swivel-face toward the camera to make the same statement, so let me do it here:
Our business model is based on the observation that no matter times badly burned, people never just never learn to sufficiently fear developments never before witnessed.
Time after time, a capricious, long-dormant tail slams down ruin and wreckage, and afterwards Goldman emerges from their sagacious tail-proof tail-packed den of stout timber iniquity tens of billions of dollars wealthier still.
For my money, you can bet large that Goldman is presently eyeing up the looming robot apocalypse as a convenient compass-spinning cover story for some devious underlying snookery even as we speak.
Now if I could figure out what this angle would be, they'd be making a movie about me, and not those chumps from The Big Short.
But unfortunately, induction interruptus resembles a Romulan bird of prey.
Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys. The reason: companies don't use automation simply to produce the same thing more cheaply; instead, they find ways to offer entirely new, improved products.
Yes, a lovely chestnut, this history thing.
For example, throughout history, the American housing market never went down. (2007 just called: they want their barm back.)
Like Moore's "law" (not so much in evidence lately), these are not laws but inductive extrapolations.
In particular, the assumption is that you won't run into a motivated reversal.
This would be where an entity—let's say Goldman Sachs—doesn't find a way to cash in on mass populations lulled into treating inductive extrapolations as blue chip gold bullion.
Many studies conducted in the past did indeed find a preference for serif typefaces. However, Tinker commented that perceived legibility was due to a great extent to familiarity with the typeface. 40 years ago sans serif typefaces were not as common as they are now, and if these studies were repeated, it would not be surprising to find completely different results. Indeed, more recent studies have shown that computer users prefer sans serif typefaces for body text online.
This is a nicely done synopsis; though I personally don't trust it as far as I can throw it, it does cast the debate in a different light: that unfamiliarity is the enemy of productivity and that the actual design (up to a point) turns out not to matter as much as we thought, further down the road.
The main cause of self-inflicted unfamiliarity: bored GUI design teams.
About that putative preference for sans serif: I personally love the clean look of sans serif for text I'm not forced to read. If the text is decorative, or supplementary, or only rarely essential to the purpose of the screen, sans serif can be a fine choice.
But if my purpose in life is to actually read and process and remember and mentally index the content, it's serif fonts all day, every day, and nothing but.
Funny, Firefox has a setting for that, which I tend to exploit.
If imposing a serif-font-only override against the page designer's wish breaks layout so badly I can no longer read the page (this is not common, but not uncommon, either) I will actually just cut and paste the article text into some large browser input text box (there's usually one handy), and read it there.
I've made heavy use of user CSS to eliminate page clutter on all my most frequent sites, which also makes my cut&paste text excision tool more effective.
I added a button to flip image content of many web pages on or off. Half the time I turn it off to clip something, then neglect to turn it back on for half a day (or half a week)—it takes me that long to chance across an article where I actually miss the photographic or graphical design flourish.
Just the text baby.
Yet again, another fine synopsis that shallowly testifies to a paucity of hard-core curmudgeon focus group spleen vent.
He understood that he had to make it usable first, and worry about function and feature completeness later (or never.)
Why do people always seem to forget that the "or never" side of this equation was once mere months away from tossing Apple onto the Adam Osborne junk heap.
Furthermore, the "function" you are discussing is the belated arrival of a working virtual memory subsystem where one could realistically run two piggish programs at the same time.
On the one side you've got the cult of the cast iron pan: everything I ever cooked, I cooked in this one pan (and it's the only pan I owned).
Obviously, high in usability.
On the other side of this, you've got a working commercial kitchen.
Obviously, low in usability.
In A Day at elBulli they document that a single service for 50 customers generates "2500 pieces of crockery, cutlery, and pans"—that being just the large or delicate excess over what already went into the commercial dishwashers.
I actually spent a bit of time studying spaced repetition (Anki is much loved by the LessWrong crowd). When measured, it seems to work, but then you get personal testimony that runs against the grain:
Eventually I realized what was going on. SR is testing your memory recall in a strictly single file measurement regime (ah, the glory of owning just one pan).
I keep most of my notes in a wiki. Just the other day I rolled over 200,000 pages views in my own wiki. That's a lot of randomly spaced repetition of my own notes and ideas.
It's surely not as effective when measured against carefully titrated SR in a single-file recall regime.
But then I realized that every time I visit a page on my wiki, I'm recalling the context of the page and its contents on six dimensions simultaneously: why did I create this page, what have I forgotten, what I have remembered, does the structure read easily in a single glance, where can I amend a link for next time, what associations does it invoke against the grain of my present quest?
There's no way SR would activate my brain as usefully when measuring in the eight-dimensional space I occupy by habit and preference. But there's also no way one could ever contrive a test environment to track progress in this messy "every burner at once" cognitive world.
People who multitask in a distracted way might even benefit from Jobs' horrible legacy of raked rock-garden fixity.
People who multitask in a deeply engaged way have no use for this single-file shit.
Finally, the guy who said that the CLI is the "flattest" interface ever is full of it. Text remains the deepest representation humanity has yet achieved. Carefully supplemented with media (this is harder than it looks), it's but half a step shy of the mythical Vulcan mind meld.
xkcd excels because Randall is really good at capturing the essential cliche of the idea.
All those cliches originated in the One Interface to Rule Them All: also known as human language (a lifetime of practice required, do sign up now).
If there is one thing in the world that I have no worries about, it's the entertainment industry's ability to feed us delicious screen candy.
Regardless of metaphorical form, candy eventually rots your soul.
I've actually taken to watching classics from the tongue-tied and psychologically bomb-sheltered 1950s (my least favourite film era) rather than the superhero man panties that Hollywood now cranks out (sorry ScarJo, this doesn't even count as film—it's a lot closer to a Gold's Gym cosplay pizza delivery service, with a looped soundtrack from Jurassic Park: Bottle Return Depot).
I have a list of over 600 movies I've seen and another list of nearly 400 I haven't seen, of which only 10% are Ewok-on-a-stick Chocolate Factory blockbusters.
In a properly balanced media diet, every original Iron Man (one of the few bling movies I actually enjoyed) is offset by Grave of the Fireflies and Letters from Iwo Jima.
Every government in the world would go to war for that power or to keep that power out of t hehe hands of another.
Your fundamental argument is that the nation state has already achieved post-biological escape velocity.
In most biological models, actual conflict peaks when the status hierarchy is uncertain or in flux (e.g. merging two flocks of chickens). The rest of the time, most of the conflict is symbolic, and even conspicuous losers are marginalized, rather than killed outright.
If you believe in evolution, this is a natural (and opt repeated) outcome for cooperative–competitive systems.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Almost everyone in who functions to a reasonable degree in human society has internalized some way to navigate the simultaneous cooperate–compete dynamic.
But the human mind loves to manufacture autobiographic memory and then adorn this with various stories used to project and inject the chosen autobiographic self-reduction into the social realm.
I can't find the quote just now, but Nabokov said of his own autobiography Speak, Memory that if an author can only write one valid autobiography, he or she isn't trying very hard.
(I was instead rewarded for my snipe hunt by chancing upon Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov, which will surely stand up as the best-spent 30 minutes of my entire week.)
Between the ages of 10 and 15 in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlanie, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Alexander Blok.
On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library.
At a later period, in Cambridge, England, between the ages of 20 and 23, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle and Rupert Brooke—have faded away, have lost the glamor and trill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.
So, too, for myself, have Poe, Verne, and Doyle faded away.
But this vertical-gradient singularity, status-hierarchy winner-take-all narrative of the Looming AGI Ascension continues to promulgated by those for whom Poe, Verne, and Doyle have not faded away.
Though its details are complex, its basic tenet is startlingly simple: Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity.
This notion of vertical-gradient AGI is even worse than brick-and-mortar rubbishing Gilderism (he was not wrong, but the gradient turned out to be twenty years rather than two years—and even at twenty years, Amazon has not yet engorged Whole Foods past its tonsils).
Here's a thing: if you discover that a class of problems admits good solutions using stochastic algorithms, it's probably because optimality is a prairie plateau rather than a pointy peak.
(How does one achieve Commanding Heights amid the dreary Saskatchewan vastness—find the most industrious gopher, add steroids to its local water supply until it's hindquarters resemble a modern chicken's forequarters, and then take up prominence upon its excavation mound).
Here's the thing about the thing: AGI might help you find a bigger, better s
1b) Technically adept users who want the freedom of a customizable browser
What actually killed Firefox is that so many people moved to Chrome for mere performance. Then, as FF lost critical mass, the security model around their previous extension model became too onerous to maintain. Shrinking the security perimeter involved moving to an extension API which doesn't allow the programmer to do very much.
I bet it's the mainly the same damn pond of fools who one day post "Firefox performance sucks ass" and the next day post something infused with hand-squeezed law-of-the-jungle pathos concerning network effects/other economies of scale.
Well, yeah. And where was all that brilliance yesterday when you switched to Chromium to shave off 50 ms here or there at the ultimate price of freedom?
So, yes, Firefox memory management sucks (it has since forever now), and that tends to drive performance into the ground, but I won't stop using Firefox as my primary browser until the very cliff face is crumbling out from under my toes.
It's an unexpected failure for a fairly reliable rocket.
Over the last 24 years, the PSLV has flown 41 times and has only suffered two failures in its launch history — the most recent mishap occurring during a mission in 1997.
This is about the same failure rate the Feynman estimated for the space shuttle—and that one had human cargo.
Engineers at Rocketdyne, the manufacturer, estimate the total probability [of catastrophic failure] as 1/10,000.
Engineers at Marshal estimate it as 1/300, while NASA management, to whom these engineers report, claims it is 1/100,000.
An independent engineer consulting for NASA thought 1 or 2 per 100 a reasonable estimate.
— Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
____
Algorithms to Live By (2016) is far from a perfect book, but it's about 20 dB less dunderheaded that the paragraph quoted from OP. When the book is not busy hitting soft pitches of its own manufacture, it offers up a unique (or less commonly seen) distillation of some important topics.
I got the most value from the chapter on Bayes rule.
* multiplicative rule: use for power-law prior * average rule: use for normal prior * additive rule: use for Erlang prior
In the power-law prior, your expectation is to continue waiting roughly (to a constant factor) as long as you've already been waiting.
In a power-law distribution, the longer something has gone on, the longer we expect it to continue going on. So a power-law event is more surprising the longer we've been waiting for it—and maximally surprising right before it happens.
Read that as "maximally surprising every damn time".
Lower layer of neural network: "My God, it's full of stars!"
Just a few layers up: "Well, an infinite dimensional object of impossible precision blacker than black wasn't going to divulge a small surprise in chapter N-1, was it now?"
For the normal distribution, you expect the average, until the event is already overdue (past average) and then you predict RSN (real soon now).
For the Erlang distribution, you just keep predicting "just five more minutes, I'm sure my quick fix will work this time!"
Raging against this kind of OP idiocy: definitely a power-law, on a data set so vast, even the stars feel lonely.
Science is still practiced by people who can be pig-headed and stick to their guns long after it has become apparent...
Einstein was criticized for sticking to his crackpot "general" theories in later life and not jumping onto the quantum bandwagon he himself had originally piloted out of the shuttle bay. But ask yourself this: did the world actually need Einstein working on quantum physics, or were all the other brilliant people involved more than sufficient?
If the stubborn Einstein had not persisted down his stubborn path, would we now be collectively guessing what might have been in the one and only Einstein had not nestled himself in the cockpit of the alien wormhole shuttle to unimagined physics?
Instead of yammering on about this old arrogance morality tale (oh, tiresome prose!) how about bringing some actual cost/benefit to the table? ____
You know, in that horrible movie, The Hobbit, I wasn't going to believe they couldn't open that stone door until there was 14 skeletons lying beneath it. If you're going to rattle the handle to the dragon's lair, the least you can do is stick to your guns (and your magic moon map). _____
For anyone interested the sociology of science, or the immensity of planet earth itself, or just in it for some mind-blowing pictures, I can't recommend the following article strongly enough:
"Bretz was making arguments, and no one was going into the field to see anything," Baker said. "They were just countering his arguments with theory." And because scientists are first and foremost human beings, they're loathe to change their theories or their minds because of mere data.
Baker told me a story as we looked out at Palouse Falls, another dramatic cataract at the head of a massive canyon, with a stream running through it that seems comically out of scale, like a toddler wearing a grown man's boots. Sometime in the late 1950s or early '60s, a geologist named Aaron Waters brought one of Bretz's most vocal critics—James Gilluly, the one who'd called his ideas "preposterous" and "incompetent"—to the scablands for a first-hand look. As they took in the sight of the falls and the canyon, Gilluly was dumbfounded by their scale. "Gilluly was just quiet the whole time," Baker said, "and as they were leaving, he broke out into this immense laugh and said, 'How could anybody be so wrong?'" After resisting Bretz's theory for decades, simply seeing the landscape with his own eyes had changed his mind.
I often visited Drumheller and the surrounding badlands in my childhood. Amazing place. Never been to Spokane, but it's not that far away. ____
Grow up. Stubbornness is a virtue every damn time stubbornness works.
The exceptions are so rare, Herzog made a movie about it, with the entire cast in character the whole wretched time.
You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it.
Heinlein, toward the end, also suffered from giant book disorder, but even then Heinlein retained enough short-form marbles to at least subtly position this blowhard on the cynical fringe.
After a thousand pages, the author runs an appalling risk of falling in love with her/his reductive-cadence secret sauce.
Harvey was advertised as being unusually dangerous because it combined wind with water (though perhaps that theory was all wet).
In any case, harm is not always a single factor condition.
In paleolithic terms, getting a belly full of carbs (fruit grove that ripens all in a day) or a belly full of cholesterol (goodbye now-extinct megafauna) wasn't that rare, but managing both as the same time was a real trick.
Insulin is a storage hormone that directs excess carbs into fat storage. Might complicate mopping up cholesterol at the same time, if these levels are also high. There was probably scant evolutionary pressure in our paleo past to sort this out.
Now I know that diet is no longer considered a major source of blood cholesterol, but for the purpose of the present narrative, how about let's not shuffle the black hats around every time the FDA adds more lipstick to the food pyramid (unless running madly from gunwale to gunwale with every food pyramid adjustment is your favourite sport).
Perhaps there is indeed some other way to adjust your diet so that carbs alone won't kill you. This study does not disagree. What this study says is that as a choice between less carbs and less fat, more people—in the era studied—would have benefited from fewer carbs.
Unless you really know what those other adjustments are, I wouldn't smirk at this gross data point.
I've even read studies in the past where the toxicity of methyl mercury seemed to be highly correlated with low selenium intake (so much so as to not kill the Japanese, unless they eat the wrong kind of whale, but that's actually red meat, not fish—OMG my brain hurts).
Long story short: if the research in the article was supposed to make me go back to McDonald's, then nope, it failed.
No, the study wasn't trying to make you think.
It was trying to tell you that other things you've been told were never all that reliable in the first place.
It takes hard mental effort to navigate a higher dimensional landscape (all of human diet) on low dimensional maps (dietary epidemiology).
StarWars, StarTrek, The Expanse, Firefly, and pretty much any space opera are all based around the idea of spaceships with people flying in them.
That's because Westerns were based on horses with people riding them.
Rockets are just mechanical horses.
You can tell hard science fiction by a simple test: no one goes anywhere. You get a transmission. Decoding it might lead to a set of events that end your civilization, but only if your transmission doesn't end theirs first.
In the movie Contact, Earth goes ahead and builds a machine it doesn't comprehend, then stupidly switches it on.
Maybe you luck into a constructive alliance. Maybe you don't.
Now we see them wasting resources on their Rust programming language, and the Servo browser engine they're writing in Rust. Neither of these projects is making any impressive progress.
So, Mr Subjective, tell us how you really feel about Perl 6.
Rust won first place for "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2016 and 2017.
I propose the Lavish Praise programming language.
It stands for "LISP admittedly very impressive shit hot", although "perhaps Rust augments industrial systems engineering".
I showed this index entry to the Mintons, asking them if they didn't think it was an enchanting biography in itself, a biography of a reluctant goddess of love. I got an unexpectedly expert answer, as one does in life sometimes. It appeared that Claire Minton, in her time, had been a professional indexer. I had never heard of such a profession before.
She told me that she had put her husband through college years before with her earnings as an indexer, that the earnings had been good, and that few people could index well.
She said that indexing was a thing that only the most amateurish author undertook to do for his own book. I asked her what she thought of Philip Castle's job.
"Flattering to the author, insulting to the reader," she said. "In a hyphenated word," she observed, with the shrewd amiability of an expert, " 'self-indulgent.' I'm always embarrassed when I see an index an author has made of his own work."
"Embarrassed?"
"It's a revealing thing, an author's index of his own work," she informed me. "It's a shameless exhibitionâ"to the trained eye."
"She can read character from an index," said her husband.
"Oh?" I said. "What can you tell about Philip Castle?"
She smiled faintly. "Things I'd better not tell strangers."
"Sorry."
"He's obviously in love with this Mona Aamons Monzano," she said.
"That's true of every man in San Lorenzo I gather."
"He has mixed feelings about his father," she said.
"That's true of every man on earth." I egged her on gently.
"He's insecure."
"What mortal isn't?" I demanded. I didn't know it then, but that was a very Bokononist thing to demand.
"He'll never marry her."
"Why not?"
"I've said all I'm going to say," she said.
"I'm gratified to meet an indexer who respects the privacy of others."
"Never index your own book," she stated.
And what do we find here, as perceived by an expert, trained AI:
Altogether there are 148 documents, including a letter from GCHQ, a handwritten draft BBC radio program about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and offers to lecture from some of America's most famous universities, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Whoever wrote this found it necessary to gloss AI and MIT, but unnecessary to gloss GCHQ.
Hmmm.
This person will never marry.
That's all I'm going to say. ______
You know, Contact is swimming along just fine, and then you meet the bug-eyed Pak Protractor in space. That's how I feel about Cat's Cradle. There were moments it went from good to great, but couldn't quite sustain the epic bits.
Better yet, everyone's contribution is valued at the same level so irrespective of what you're contributing with your time, the money you earn for that "unit" of time will be the same as everyone else.
Treating a diverse group of people as inherently "the same" is not a hill I would personally choose to die on.
If ever there was a title longer than it needed to be, it was this one.
Before the advent of modern electronics, you typical "golden ear"—who could hear things that no other mortal could hear—wandered about the desert bending everyone's ear about his dire need of acid-free parchment paper or single-crystal stone tablets.
No one need wonder why Theodore Sturgeon wrote Need in 1960.
On a side note, some believe that Sturgeon's Baby is Three was an advance paean to what ultimately become Dianetics.
Above all, Alex conducted scores of interviews with important literary figures. In fact, he probably met more famous authors than anyone else on earth. Among them were Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Gunter Grass, Chinua Achebe and Jorge Luis Borges, who delighted Alex by saying that when he himself wrote horror stories, he shed tears, "tears of laughter". A selection of these conversations was issued in 2012 under the title Writing Talk.
Weirdly, this is exactly the kind of book I tend to seek out, so I'm surprised he was not on my radar already. Weirdly (again), Borges shows up in this connection surprisingly often.
As far as I'm concerned, if Alex wrote "Super-Toys" then "Super-Toys" it is, then. Case closed. Recount denied.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, it's going to take a long damn time for Equifax to out this tiny blemish from their permanent spot record.
"O, but she'll keep her word."
Actually, sorry Hamlet, cat's entirely out of the bag now.
Hmm, hand-wavy tone, entirely unlike Wikipedia. What could possibly go wrong?
Wikipedia:
Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
To add a tiny dollop of credibility to that long personal screed, the game I played most was unusual in that while you would normally be pursued by two dozen soon-to-become claustrophobic objects, probably 15 of those objects would have a future trajectory that was deterministic based on your own movements (one little Z80 can only do so much ...)
I actually don't know any other game of that intensity where you can glance away from your present task with such relentless foresight.
There was another game a few years later with about sixty objects in constant pursuit—amid a veritable blur of fireballs and grenades—but they tended to clump together, and you could settle for blindly taking out any three of five, before glancing back to assess the precise statistical mechanics.
Eye management was a valuable skill in many games I played later, but only these games rewarded it quite so ruthlessly as described.
It's not just shiny object affliction. This chick apparently has a stack depth of 1.5 items.
Even after fifteen consecutive distractions, I still usually know I left the kettle on.
To begin with, I have about a five-task planning horizon. This isn't even a stack. On a good day, I can be actively pursuing three tasks in parallel, while sizing up two more off to the side (and maybe grabbing utensils soon to be needed, if in my other flurry I discover them near to hand).
I originally learned to do this playing too many arcade games in my early twenties. I played one game with two joysticks for so many hours, that my cognition perceptibly split in two. I became completely aware of one planning horizon for navigation (mostly evasion, some targetting) and a separate planning horizon for aggression (the weapon stick) and some kind of mutual constraint optimization going on between these (this sometimes in the heat of the moment fell by the wayside, and my two hands would simply continue to function independently, each hand sort of making guesses about what the other hand might do—there was often a point in those old arcade games where the game would decide you had already played long enough, and it was time to terminate you with extreme prejudice; often I managed to beat the game nevertheless, but good luck keeping both hands on a fully coordinated, shared page for the death-defying duration; this was back during the Miller's Crossing "ethics" phase, where game designers felt obligated to give you a real chance, however slim).
I also have a sleep disorder, and regularly in the thick of my sleep disorder, my elite, simultaneous planning horizon shrinks down to a single task (or portion thereof). Damn is that annoying. And there's this voice that follows me throughout the whole day: "You know what? If you had your real brain, you'd have dunked that basketball three times just on the way to the bathroom to take a piss. And today you haven't managed to dunk that basketball even once in the past hour, sitting in your work chair, occupied with nothing else."
And I go, "thanks for the vote of confidence; and, oh yeah, ba da bing for reminding me where I was heading just now".
On the squirrel front, I have a somewhat different problem than the chick of the moment. My verbal intelligence is like Uncle Buck. Once he enters the room, it's very hard to send him packing again so I can return to working on math or code: 300 immobile lbs of curtain-ring Velcro. Consequently, I've also subjected myself to this kind of sad self-chaperonage, but for a different reason: to try to keep my word-brain at bay for long enough to accomplish other things.
Ideally, I would get through three two-hour blocks by mid-day and that would be the end of my technical obligations. But even ten minutes of Rachel Maddow (is the world still here? huh? is it? huh?) while I consume my morning coffee and jot a few notes in my journal is sometimes enough to compromise my entire morning. My squirrels are mainly verbal notions; they are generated internally, from the very first meagre sign of a toasted bread crumb, all the way until the sun goes down.
When I was feeling up for it, I used to sometimes cook a five course meal, with five unfamiliar recipes, selected from an unfamiliar cuisine (one time it was Korean, another time some country in Africa), involving maybe a dozen unfamiliar ingredients, while aiming to serve all of these dishes hot more or less at the same time. Usually I managed four, while shunting a problem child into "maybe tomorrow", or "maybe next time". Which should make it obvious why I clipped the following paragraphs on first encounter:
Time Is on Your Side — 7 October 2015
Welcome to the 2020s, where having a job is a job.
It always goes like this. Whatever the Chicken Littles of the world are screaming about don't exactly come to pass, but something else changes, and not for the better.
The sordid underbelly of stagnant wages? Now you're working even harder in the margins to maintain your claim on the same dollar. This is yet another form of outsourcing to the employee, and I bet you can't even claim your office space at home devoted to all this "job upkeep" as a valid tax write-off.
Yet you are now 20% revenue-zero independent contractor, just to keep your day job in good standing.
In The Big Short the two young guys explicitly state that their business model is based on the observation that people prefer sunny thoughts, so they bet on big payoffs when sunny thoughts mushroom cloud (while loosing small when daisies reign).
The movie doesn't have a collar wad at Goldman swivel-face toward the camera to make the same statement, so let me do it here:
Time after time, a capricious, long-dormant tail slams down ruin and wreckage, and afterwards Goldman emerges from their sagacious tail-proof tail-packed den of stout timber iniquity tens of billions of dollars wealthier still.
For my money, you can bet large that Goldman is presently eyeing up the looming robot apocalypse as a convenient compass-spinning cover story for some devious underlying snookery even as we speak.
Now if I could figure out what this angle would be, they'd be making a movie about me, and not those chumps from The Big Short.
But unfortunately, induction interruptus resembles a Romulan bird of prey.
Generally speaking, once seen, twice fried.
Yes, a lovely chestnut, this history thing.
For example, throughout history, the American housing market never went down. (2007 just called: they want their barm back.)
Like Moore's "law" (not so much in evidence lately), these are not laws but inductive extrapolations.
In particular, the assumption is that you won't run into a motivated reversal.
This would be where an entity—let's say Goldman Sachs—doesn't find a way to cash in on mass populations lulled into treating inductive extrapolations as blue chip gold bullion.
This would be wary you should be.
Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces? — 17 February 2008
This is a nicely done synopsis; though I personally don't trust it as far as I can throw it, it does cast the debate in a different light: that unfamiliarity is the enemy of productivity and that the actual design (up to a point) turns out not to matter as much as we thought, further down the road.
The main cause of self-inflicted unfamiliarity: bored GUI design teams.
About that putative preference for sans serif: I personally love the clean look of sans serif for text I'm not forced to read. If the text is decorative, or supplementary, or only rarely essential to the purpose of the screen, sans serif can be a fine choice.
But if my purpose in life is to actually read and process and remember and mentally index the content, it's serif fonts all day, every day, and nothing but.
Funny, Firefox has a setting for that, which I tend to exploit.
If imposing a serif-font-only override against the page designer's wish breaks layout so badly I can no longer read the page (this is not common, but not uncommon, either) I will actually just cut and paste the article text into some large browser input text box (there's usually one handy), and read it there.
I've made heavy use of user CSS to eliminate page clutter on all my most frequent sites, which also makes my cut&paste text excision tool more effective.
I added a button to flip image content of many web pages on or off. Half the time I turn it off to clip something, then neglect to turn it back on for half a day (or half a week)—it takes me that long to chance across an article where I actually miss the photographic or graphical design flourish.
Just the text baby.
Yet again, another fine synopsis that shallowly testifies to a paucity of hard-core curmudgeon focus group spleen vent.
Why do people always seem to forget that the "or never" side of this equation was once mere months away from tossing Apple onto the Adam Osborne junk heap.
Furthermore, the "function" you are discussing is the belated arrival of a working virtual memory subsystem where one could realistically run two piggish programs at the same time.
On the one side you've got the cult of the cast iron pan: everything I ever cooked, I cooked in this one pan (and it's the only pan I owned).
Obviously, high in usability.
On the other side of this, you've got a working commercial kitchen.
Obviously, low in usability.
In A Day at elBulli they document that a single service for 50 customers generates "2500 pieces of crockery, cutlery, and pans"—that being just the large or delicate excess over what already went into the commercial dishwashers.
I actually spent a bit of time studying spaced repetition (Anki is much loved by the LessWrong crowd). When measured, it seems to work, but then you get personal testimony that runs against the grain:
A vote against spaced repetition — 10 March 2014
Eventually I realized what was going on. SR is testing your memory recall in a strictly single file measurement regime (ah, the glory of owning just one pan).
I keep most of my notes in a wiki. Just the other day I rolled over 200,000 pages views in my own wiki. That's a lot of randomly spaced repetition of my own notes and ideas.
It's surely not as effective when measured against carefully titrated SR in a single-file recall regime.
But then I realized that every time I visit a page on my wiki, I'm recalling the context of the page and its contents on six dimensions simultaneously: why did I create this page, what have I forgotten, what I have remembered, does the structure read easily in a single glance, where can I amend a link for next time, what associations does it invoke against the grain of my present quest?
There's no way SR would activate my brain as usefully when measuring in the eight-dimensional space I occupy by habit and preference. But there's also no way one could ever contrive a test environment to track progress in this messy "every burner at once" cognitive world.
People who multitask in a distracted way might even benefit from Jobs' horrible legacy of raked rock-garden fixity.
People who multitask in a deeply engaged way have no use for this single-file shit.
Finally, the guy who said that the CLI is the "flattest" interface ever is full of it. Text remains the deepest representation humanity has yet achieved. Carefully supplemented with media (this is harder than it looks), it's but half a step shy of the mythical Vulcan mind meld.
xkcd excels because Randall is really good at capturing the essential cliche of the idea.
All those cliches originated in the One Interface to Rule Them All: also known as human language (a lifetime of practice required, do sign up now).
Regardless of metaphorical form, candy eventually rots your soul.
I've actually taken to watching classics from the tongue-tied and psychologically bomb-sheltered 1950s (my least favourite film era) rather than the superhero man panties that Hollywood now cranks out (sorry ScarJo, this doesn't even count as film—it's a lot closer to a Gold's Gym cosplay pizza delivery service, with a looped soundtrack from Jurassic Park: Bottle Return Depot).
I have a list of over 600 movies I've seen and another list of nearly 400 I haven't seen, of which only 10% are Ewok-on-a-stick Chocolate Factory blockbusters.
In a properly balanced media diet, every original Iron Man (one of the few bling movies I actually enjoyed) is offset by Grave of the Fireflies and Letters from Iwo Jima.
Your fundamental argument is that the nation state has already achieved post-biological escape velocity.
In most biological models, actual conflict peaks when the status hierarchy is uncertain or in flux (e.g. merging two flocks of chickens). The rest of the time, most of the conflict is symbolic, and even conspicuous losers are marginalized, rather than killed outright.
If you believe in evolution, this is a natural (and opt repeated) outcome for cooperative–competitive systems.
Almost everyone in who functions to a reasonable degree in human society has internalized some way to navigate the simultaneous cooperate–compete dynamic.
But the human mind loves to manufacture autobiographic memory and then adorn this with various stories used to project and inject the chosen autobiographic self-reduction into the social realm.
I can't find the quote just now, but Nabokov said of his own autobiography Speak, Memory that if an author can only write one valid autobiography, he or she isn't trying very hard.
(I was instead rewarded for my snipe hunt by chancing upon Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov, which will surely stand up as the best-spent 30 minutes of my entire week.)
So, too, for myself, have Poe, Verne, and Doyle faded away.
But this vertical-gradient singularity, status-hierarchy winner-take-all narrative of the Looming AGI Ascension continues to promulgated by those for whom Poe, Verne, and Doyle have not faded away.
The Gilder Paradigm — 1 December 1996
This notion of vertical-gradient AGI is even worse than brick-and-mortar rubbishing Gilderism (he was not wrong, but the gradient turned out to be twenty years rather than two years—and even at twenty years, Amazon has not yet engorged Whole Foods past its tonsils).
Here's a thing: if you discover that a class of problems admits good solutions using stochastic algorithms, it's probably because optimality is a prairie plateau rather than a pointy peak.
(How does one achieve Commanding Heights amid the dreary Saskatchewan vastness—find the most industrious gopher, add steroids to its local water supply until it's hindquarters resemble a modern chicken's forequarters, and then take up prominence upon its excavation mound).
Here's the thing about the thing: AGI might help you find a bigger, better s
What actually killed Firefox is that so many people moved to Chrome for mere performance. Then, as FF lost critical mass, the security model around their previous extension model became too onerous to maintain. Shrinking the security perimeter involved moving to an extension API which doesn't allow the programmer to do very much.
I bet it's the mainly the same damn pond of fools who one day post "Firefox performance sucks ass" and the next day post something infused with hand-squeezed law-of-the-jungle pathos concerning network effects/other economies of scale.
Well, yeah. And where was all that brilliance yesterday when you switched to Chromium to shave off 50 ms here or there at the ultimate price of freedom?
So, yes, Firefox memory management sucks (it has since forever now), and that tends to drive performance into the ground, but I won't stop using Firefox as my primary browser until the very cliff face is crumbling out from under my toes.
A man leaping from the roof surely passes another man taking the stairs.
Much depends upon a rucksack of Houdini Handkerchiefs 2.0 sandwiched betwixt our hero's blades.
This is about the same failure rate the Feynman estimated for the space shuttle—and that one had human cargo.
____
Algorithms to Live By (2016) is far from a perfect book, but it's about 20 dB less dunderheaded that the paragraph quoted from OP. When the book is not busy hitting soft pitches of its own manufacture, it offers up a unique (or less commonly seen) distillation of some important topics.
I got the most value from the chapter on Bayes rule.
* multiplicative rule: use for power-law prior
* average rule: use for normal prior
* additive rule: use for Erlang prior
In the power-law prior, your expectation is to continue waiting roughly (to a constant factor) as long as you've already been waiting.
Read that as "maximally surprising every damn time".
Lower layer of neural network: "My God, it's full of stars!"
Just a few layers up: "Well, an infinite dimensional object of impossible precision blacker than black wasn't going to divulge a small surprise in chapter N-1, was it now?"
For the normal distribution, you expect the average, until the event is already overdue (past average) and then you predict RSN (real soon now).
For the Erlang distribution, you just keep predicting "just five more minutes, I'm sure my quick fix will work this time!"
Raging against this kind of OP idiocy: definitely a power-law, on a data set so vast, even the stars feel lonely.
Draw a giant circle around Langley.
You'll want your audience to include North Vancouver, Chilliwack, the Gulf Islands, and Victoria.
Welcome to Mount Vernon, loud and clear.
http://cbctransmission.ca/en/m...
Turns out the CBC actually operates antennas on the burnt-roast fringe in Sooke, Richmond, Abbotsford, and Chilliwack.
Einstein was criticized for sticking to his crackpot "general" theories in later life and not jumping onto the quantum bandwagon he himself had originally piloted out of the shuttle bay. But ask yourself this: did the world actually need Einstein working on quantum physics, or were all the other brilliant people involved more than sufficient?
If the stubborn Einstein had not persisted down his stubborn path, would we now be collectively guessing what might have been in the one and only Einstein had not nestled himself in the cockpit of the alien wormhole shuttle to unimagined physics?
Instead of yammering on about this old arrogance morality tale (oh, tiresome prose!) how about bringing some actual cost/benefit to the table?
____
You know, in that horrible movie, The Hobbit, I wasn't going to believe they couldn't open that stone door until there was 14 skeletons lying beneath it. If you're going to rattle the handle to the dragon's lair, the least you can do is stick to your guns (and your magic moon map).
_____
For anyone interested the sociology of science, or the immensity of planet earth itself, or just in it for some mind-blowing pictures, I can't recommend the following article strongly enough:
Formed by Megafloods, This Place Fooled Scientists for Decades — 9 March 2017
I often visited Drumheller and the surrounding badlands in my childhood. Amazing place. Never been to Spokane, but it's not that far away.
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Grow up. Stubbornness is a virtue every damn time stubbornness works.
The exceptions are so rare, Herzog made a movie about it, with the entire cast in character the whole wretched time.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Heinlein, toward the end, also suffered from giant book disorder, but even then Heinlein retained enough short-form marbles to at least subtly position this blowhard on the cynical fringe.
After a thousand pages, the author runs an appalling risk of falling in love with her/his reductive-cadence secret sauce.
Harvey was advertised as being unusually dangerous because it combined wind with water (though perhaps that theory was all wet).
In any case, harm is not always a single factor condition.
In paleolithic terms, getting a belly full of carbs (fruit grove that ripens all in a day) or a belly full of cholesterol (goodbye now-extinct megafauna) wasn't that rare, but managing both as the same time was a real trick.
Insulin is a storage hormone that directs excess carbs into fat storage. Might complicate mopping up cholesterol at the same time, if these levels are also high. There was probably scant evolutionary pressure in our paleo past to sort this out.
Now I know that diet is no longer considered a major source of blood cholesterol, but for the purpose of the present narrative, how about let's not shuffle the black hats around every time the FDA adds more lipstick to the food pyramid (unless running madly from gunwale to gunwale with every food pyramid adjustment is your favourite sport).
Perhaps there is indeed some other way to adjust your diet so that carbs alone won't kill you. This study does not disagree. What this study says is that as a choice between less carbs and less fat, more people—in the era studied—would have benefited from fewer carbs.
Unless you really know what those other adjustments are, I wouldn't smirk at this gross data point.
I've even read studies in the past where the toxicity of methyl mercury seemed to be highly correlated with low selenium intake (so much so as to not kill the Japanese, unless they eat the wrong kind of whale, but that's actually red meat, not fish—OMG my brain hurts).
No, the study wasn't trying to make you think.
It was trying to tell you that other things you've been told were never all that reliable in the first place.
It takes hard mental effort to navigate a higher dimensional landscape (all of human diet) on low dimensional maps (dietary epidemiology).
Whatever you were eating before, I suggest fish.
That's because Westerns were based on horses with people riding them.
Rockets are just mechanical horses.
You can tell hard science fiction by a simple test: no one goes anywhere. You get a transmission. Decoding it might lead to a set of events that end your civilization, but only if your transmission doesn't end theirs first.
In the movie Contact, Earth goes ahead and builds a machine it doesn't comprehend, then stupidly switches it on.
Maybe you luck into a constructive alliance. Maybe you don't.
SETI is not a toy.
So, Mr Subjective, tell us how you really feel about Perl 6.
I propose the Lavish Praise programming language.
It stands for "LISP admittedly very impressive shit hot", although "perhaps Rust augments industrial systems engineering".
55. Never Index Your Own Book
And what do we find here, as perceived by an expert, trained AI:
Whoever wrote this found it necessary to gloss AI and MIT, but unnecessary to gloss GCHQ.
Hmmm.
This person will never marry.
That's all I'm going to say.
______
You know, Contact is swimming along just fine, and then you meet the bug-eyed Pak Protractor in space. That's how I feel about Cat's Cradle. There were moments it went from good to great, but couldn't quite sustain the epic bits.
Ellie and S R Hadden
One thing about Hadden is that he's really fond of the Ken Burns effect in his private Vidipedia recaps.
That's all I'm going to say.
Treating a diverse group of people as inherently "the same" is not a hill I would personally choose to die on.
May the force fit be with you.
If ever there was a title longer than it needed to be, it was this one.
Before the advent of modern electronics, you typical "golden ear"—who could hear things that no other mortal could hear—wandered about the desert bending everyone's ear about his dire need of acid-free parchment paper or single-crystal stone tablets.
No one need wonder why Theodore Sturgeon wrote Need in 1960.
On a side note, some believe that Sturgeon's Baby is Three was an advance paean to what ultimately become Dianetics.
Well, who is this Alex Hamilton, anyway, with most of a famous name?
Alex Hamilton obituary — November 2016
Weirdly, this is exactly the kind of book I tend to seek out, so I'm surprised he was not on my radar already. Weirdly (again), Borges shows up in this connection surprisingly often.
As far as I'm concerned, if Alex wrote "Super-Toys" then "Super-Toys" it is, then. Case closed. Recount denied.
s/thing/think