cogware

TLDR for the article: The nascent field of AR games has not, heretofore, produced compelling experiences. There now is one wildly successful AR game, but it is successful because it taps into a massive, well-loved cultural phenomenon. This is "tragic".

My thoughts: I've met dozens of people while playing Pokemon Go in the past few days. Seen many clumps of strangers trading tips about where different Pokemon are and comparing the ones they caught. The gameplay is not particularly polished or deep, and the servers are constantly being overwhelmed by the game's success-disaster, but overall, I see a lot of promise. If they add more mechanics that encourage people to form groups and play together, it can drive a lot more positive, serendipitous connections in the world - a rebuttal to those who think that smartphones will necessarily make us more introverted and asocial.

I don't fault Niantic at all for the bugs, crashes, or capacity issues. Most apps have bugs and issues on their first release. Almost never do they surpass Twitter's DAU within their first week of launch. They should be lauded for such a great success and for keeping the lights on with so much usage.

This article is pure polemical, without any justification for its claims (not even a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what kind increase in taxes would result from ending offshore tax evasion). Outrage is not a substitute for mathematics or economics.

I personally support UBI, but we need to ensure that it's sustainable.

This seems like an interesting article, but I found it very difficult to read. For example, from the introductory paragraph:

This literature equates the possibility of time travel with the existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs) or worldlines for material particles that are smooth, future-directed timelike curves with self-intersections.[3] Since time machines designate devices which bring about the existence of CTCs and thus enable time travel, the paradoxes of time travel are irrelevant for attempted “no-go” results for time machines because these results concern what happens before the emergence of CTCs.[4] This, in our opinion, is fortunate since the paradoxes of time travel are nothing more than a crude way of bringing out the fact that the application of familiar local laws of relativistic physics to a spacetime background which contains CTCs typically requires that consistency constraints on initial data must be met in order for a local solution of the laws to be extendable to a global solution.

I'm not sure what the intended audience for this is; combination philosopher physicists? Given that it's on SEP it seems unreasonable to assume that CTCs need no other explanation than that they are smooth, future-directed timelike curves with intersections. I would love it if someone would ELI5 this concept, though.

Agreed, it would have been wiser for his post to just be about LambdaConf and FP.

How is LambdaConf "destroyed"? That seems like pure hyperbole. The conference will go on, and most people won't remember this Moldbug business longer than 15 minutes.

It's also not clear to me what is the "intolerance" that they are tolerating. Can you provide textual evidence for Moldbug being intolerant? In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.

I'm really impressed with how quickly the Typescript team is adding new features - it feels like every time I check in on them they have something new in the works that I really care about. Great work!

Great tutorial - Well written and good patterns for TensorFlow usage, e.g. checkpointing, name scopes for cleaning up the graph visualization, and using summaries/TensorBoard, and also nice explanations of the concepts.

Though I'm curious why you used VALID padding not SAME for the conv layers? It seems like it would be simpler to use SAME.

Also, minor nit: TensorFlow and TensorBoard should both have two letters capitalized

"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal."

I wonder why this is? Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?