Syntactically it's quite a bit better than an N-gram markov chain: it gets indentation exactly right, it balances parentheses, braces, and comment start/end markers, delimits strings with quotation marks, and so on. You're right that it's no better than a markov chain at understanding the "code" it's producing, at least at the level a human programmer does.
Discussion on Hacker News. Definitely an interesting article, very readable and (to me) entertaining. But I agree with interstice that it doesn't say much about strong AI.
Yes and no. Morality is certainly less fundamental than physics, but I would argue no less real a concept than "breakfast" or "love," and has enough coherence – thingness – to be useful to try to outline and reason about.
The central feature of morality that needs explaining, as I understand it, is how certain behaviors or decisions make you feel in relation to how other people feel about your behaviors. Which is not something you have full control over. It is a distributed cognitive algorithm, a mechanism for directing social behavior t...
In my experience, micro optimizations like these represent yet another thing to keep track of. The upside is pretty small, while the potential downside (forget to cancel a card?) is larger. If you're ok with paying the attentional overhead or it's a source of entertainment, go for it.
Personally I'd rather use a standard rewards card (mine is 1.5% cash), not have to think about it, and spend my limited cognitive resources on doing well at my job, looking out for new opportunities with large upsides, working on side projects, or networking.
That's interesting, because to me it read more like "I'm going to write something interesting about anything you like, do some research for you, and even share the results" and "as long as I have to do this assignment I might as well make it useful to someone" but maybe that's because I recognized the poster's name, read his blog, etc.
I can see how someone might interpret it this way, though.
Not something I actually did last month, since I wrote the piece two years ago, but it feels like it since that's when the validation arrived. A blog post of mine hit /r/basicincome and then /r/futurism, which are sitting at ~470 (98% positive) and ~1080 (92% positive) votes respectively, and found its way to hacker news. Some of the discussion is pretty good. The relevant quote:
..."Let us keep in mind how poorly we treat those who cannot currently contribute to society. Sooner or later we will have to face this question: how do we define personal wort
Schmidhuber's formulation of curiosity and interestingness as a (possibly the) human learning algorithm. Now when someone says "that's interesting" I gain information about the situation, where previously I interpreted it purely as an expression of an emotion. I still see it primarily about emotion, but now understand the whys of the emotional response: it's what (part of) our learning algorithm feels like from the inside.
There are some interesting signaling implications as well.
This, I assume? (It took me a few tries to find it since first I typed in the name wrong and then it turns out it's "Wardley" with an 'a'.) Is the video on that page a good introduction?
Networking.
There is undoubtedly some slop built in to the system, both to cover ordinary fluctuations in demand (which is, after all, stochastic), and because inventory control is itself expensive and difficult and only worth doing up to a certain level of precision.
That said, there's a fallacy here, the same one as in this recent post (addressed here, e.g.). In brief, what matters is not whether you cause stores to waste measurably less food with certainly, but the expected amount of change in food waste due to your actions, especially over the long term.
Speedcubing. I don't recommend it, though—I started about a year ago and it sniped a significant amount of my free time in 2014, on the order of 400-500 hours. (I had a similar experience with Go in college.)
I've been fasting one day a week since the beginning of May of this year. I usually start Sunday evening and fast through Monday evening or Tuesday morning, around 24 to 36 hours, and this fits my schedule pretty well—alternate-day would be considerably more difficult. The trickiest part is declining offers from coworkers to go to lunch and then having to explain why. Sleeping through the night on Monday can be a little uncomfortable if I'm doing a longer fast.
I've fasted erratically for years (when I felt like it, which turned out to be once every month o...
That's consistent with my experience. That is, most people aren't particularly impressed, or don't want to let on that they are, and I'm only moderately impressed with myself. And I'm fine with that, since these days I make an effort not to indulge the urge to optimize for impressiveness, except evidently in threads like these.
Contrast this with juggling 5 balls, which is for me about the same level of difficulty (both in terms of learning the skill and performing it once learned). People are much more likely to be visibly impressed, though the way they show it isn't always agreeable or complimentary.
Solved a Rubik's cube in under 15 seconds. Still having trouble getting my averages below 25, though.
I generally agree, but I'd caution against raising threats to the level of mutual knowledge. Intuitively it feels dangerous to ask things like "are you threatening me?" Thinking about it for a few minutes, it seems that it's dangerous in part because once a threat has been made explicit, the threatening party can no longer back down without losing face and credibility. The question also feels like a power play and can be seen as disrespectful.
It's still good to know whether you're just dealing with a hostile argument vs. a real threat vs. intimidation without intent to follow through, but when there's a power differential it's probably bad for the knowledge to be out in the open.
I consider myself a vim poweruser and this doesn't match my experience. Vim is a great tool and I use it for a lot of things, but it's absolutely not a replacement for bash, screen, Chrome, etc.
I haven't been playing on KGS recently, but if you're interested in a teaching game send me a PM and we can schedule something. I'm around 4k.
I used to feel that way about interruptions, but at this point I'm not convinced that taking breaks is particularly harmful to my productivity as a programmer. I'm usually in one of two situations. I'm either stuck on something, in which case taking a break can be helpful, or in the zone, in which case I know exactly what I'm doing and it takes less than a minute to get back into things. The intuition that interruptions are bad for productivity might stem from the fact that being interrupted feels unpleasant.
Of course my experience may not apply to everyone, etc, etc.
I've sometimes been in the habit of talking into my phone, which conveniently removes the social stigma as long as no one is close enough to hear what you're saying. Taking walks helps. You can either record yourself or not—I find that talking into an inert phone feels awkward while recording myself makes me feel a little self-conscious. I never did find a method I was completely comfortable with, which might be why I don't do it anymore.
Anyway, I'm generally a fan of self-talk / private speech. I think it's a good way to put your thoughts through a BS det...
The hows and whys of refactoring and DRY. How and why to achieve proper separation of concerns (I still have lots to learn there).
Social protocols, especially around initiating and maintaining friendships and other levels of relationships. Being empathetic.
While it's probably justified to correct for the sampling bias in prevalence statistics, it's worth pointing out that sexual partners are not sampled uniformly: the prevalence of a given STD will potentially be higher in the population of likely partners than in the general population.
That's a good point, and probably applies to Mark Manson's guide too. It's similar to the well-known point that your friends are probably more popular than you are, because popular people have more friends.
Looking back at this, I'm realizing that a lot of these suggestions are more plain old advice rather than force multipliers. The true force multipliers are proficiency with tools, continually investing in improving your workflow, and probably certain people skills like delegation and team-building.
As pushcx said it's not about speed as much as not having to pay attention to what your fingers are doing (and crucially, being able to look elsewhere while you type). The bottleneck isn't bandwidth but the size of your L1 cache.
This sort of optimization is a pretty foundational concept for software engineers. These are things that have helped my career as a software engineer and made me more effective in my job (not exactly the same thing, but related!):
Basics
More Advanced Mechanics
As you get older, you gain more ability to buy utility at good prices: for instance, kids become increasingly expensive as they age.
Perhaps because my economic intuition isn't that sharp, I'm having trouble connecting the dots on this statement. I'm not seeing how the example implies the assertion, and I'm having trouble coming up with another example. Can you expand on this?
This is interesting, thanks for the link. The model seems to be partly based on one's assessment of self-worth as compared to their partner. Based on this I'd expect to see a person exhibit different styles depending on who they're dating, though this effect could be diminished by acclimation. This might account for some portion of the 20-30% of people who change styles. Is this explored in the literature? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding and the self- and other-assessments are purely positive or negative and not at all comparative.
Also I tried searching for ...
You're right, I made some assumptions that probably don't apply to SaidAchmiz, and I realize my comment comes off poorly. I apologize. I was trying to refer to the situation from the OP, but found it difficult to write about without using a hypothetical "you" and I'm not entirely satisfied with the result.
What I was trying to get across is that this kind of situation can be complex and that the girlfriend in the scenario can have legitimate emotional justification for behaving this way. I agree that wishing you'd lied is a bad situation to be in....
I understand the sentiment, but I'd caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person. This is bad even if you don't intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what's on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse.
Perhaps part of what you're objecti...
This is a great idea for a regular thread! Thanks for posting.
I'm taking Computing for Data Analysis on Coursera, which is more or less an R primer. There's only one more week left in my session, so there's not much time left to study together, but regardless I'm open to studying with other LWers taking the course. So far it's pretty good, so I can recommend the course if you're thinking of taking it.
I probably won't have much time for MOOCing in the near future since next week I'm starting a new job that I expect to be intellectually demanding and I'll wa...
It's always about direction of attention
This is one of my favorite things about a certain brand of writing: it's meta, or somehow self-aware or self-similar, without rubbing the fact in your face. Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium are also like this (and are the only lit-crit-like thing I've ever enjoyed reading).
The toast is Josey Baker Bread (yes, that's actually his name; short documentary here) and it really is that good. By which I mean, as another exploitative Bay Area techie, I've paid that price at The Mill more than once and I felt it was worth it.
I more or less agree, but note that extra effort does not necessarily mean extra hours. Though, depending on who you work for the latter might be a good proxy for the former.
This is closely related to a failure mode of communication discussed here recently. The error made by the "fascists" and "rakes" in the linked post is a special case of the OP's error of assumed variables: in this case the hidden variable is whose morality applies.
My guess is that these miscommunications often arise from inadequate empathy or theory of mind. It's very common for assertions to have hidden or assumed variables that are reflexive, that is, they refer to the speaker. Some people have the ability to automatically transfer th...
A little while back I read a Language Log post on this, one of Mark Liberman's breakfast experiments. He looks at differences in switch timing, which I think is the same as what you're calling LSV, between male and female speakers in a large corpus of telephone conversations.
A very readable new paper on causality on Andrew Gelman's blog: Forward causal inference and reverse causal questions. It doesn't have any new results, but motivates asking "why" questions in addition to "what if" questions to facilitate model checking and hypothesis generation. Abstract:
...The statistical and econometrics literature on causality is more focused on “effects of causes” than on “causes of effects.” That is, in the standard approach it is natural to study the effect of a treatment, but it is not in general possible to defin
I took the survey. Thanks for putting this together, Yvain!
I chose DEFECT: CFAR/MIRI can keep their money. Furthermore, if I win I precommit to refusing payment and donating $120 * (1 - X) to MIRI, where X is the proportion of people who answer COOPERATE. I humbly suggest that others do the same.
Do you ever study with pomodoros, and if so does that affect whether or how often you eject?
Which seems related to building skills in the right order.
Personally I find that during study it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between material that is too challenging and material that is difficult but tractable with some effort. That is, I have to put forth the effort either way and it's only afterwards that I find out which is the case.
I'm a fairly long-time Anki user, about 2.5 years now, and my biggest frustration with it is a lack of workflow. I've tried to set one up a couple of times, including one point where I was using Anki's CSV import functionality, but there were always too many steps. Things would get backed up at the bottleneck. So at this point I just use it in maintenance mode and add a new card manually once a month or so.
(My second biggest frustration is that Anki doesn't really let you learn things as sets, and I can't figure out how to make cards parameterized. For exa...
Here's another blog post that's largely a response to The Power of Habit: http://simulacrumbs.com/2013/09/shouts-whispers-and-the-myth-of-willpower-a-recursive-guide-to-efficacy/. It also touches heavily on some of the ideas you developed in your post on addiction and games. If you don't already know this guy, you probably should.
I've been thinking about self-administering mild electric shocks or something of the like when I pursue an unwanted behaviour, but lack an appropriate device. Any suggestions, anyone?
This has been discussed here previously. Short answer: don't. Also, from a LWer's excellent summary of Don't Shoot the Dog:
Note: self-punishment is particularly useless; you train down the act of punishing yourself more than you train down whatever behavior you’re punishing. This is unpleasant and useless!
Not at this time. I am planning on porting the game to Android in the coming months, but this is not my top priority, so I can't guarantee when it'll be available.
Thanks! I'm very much open to feedback and suggestions, so fire away.
I released my first game to the App Store on Oct 1. It's a dual n-back game with a rhythm component called Double Dynamo. (Previously mentioned in the July what are you working on thread.)
2 will still lead to some strange behavior. For example, when composing a comment on a forum, rather than typing directly into the textarea you'll switch to a text editor and copy-paste when you're done.
The existing karma system does a good job of addressing the first two possibilities, but the last three cases are still pretty hard to distinguish. Kaj_Sotala seems to be talking about cases 4 and 5, more or less.
As long as we're talking about a technical solution, it seems like the relevant dimension that Kaj is talking about is difficulty/understandability as opposed to agreement or general quality, and I can imagine a few different solutions to this[1]. That said, I'm not convinced that this would tell you the information you're after, since readers who...
First of all, I can highly recommend Nachmanovitch's Free Play. It's at the very least thought-provoking and entertaining—whether it helps you be more creative is harder to tell. I got a bit of milage creativitywise out of Comedy Writing Secrets, which I hear is well-regarded among professional humor writers. I wasn't very diligent about the exercises, or I might have gotten more out of it.
Regarding LW-like thought and creativity, I'm reading through Minsky's Society of Mind and the Puzzle Principle section talks about machines and creativity:
... (read more)