danblick
Joined 17 years ago
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Member since
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Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
I'd recommend thinking a little about the algorithms involved in efficiently assigning a nearby task to each dwarf and then planning a path for each dwarf to its destination.
It gets interesting pretty fast and a PhD would not hurt. :)
e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08291
Would you maintain a roadmap telling you how to get from place to place, or just constantly replan? What happens when you change the available paths by building a wall or locking a door?
Comment · 6 years ago
John McWhorter is a well-known linguist who talks about things like comparative linguistics. He's said in the past that (colloquial) Indonesian is one of the most streamlined languages around. (But really English is becoming the world's international language.)
One of the topics in McWhorter's research is about how languages become streamlined when they are learned by adults as a second language. English, Mandarin, and Swahili all show evidence of this (for English, it seems related to the Vikings).
Related post:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...
For people interested in human languages (or people who don't yet know they're interested in human languages), you might enjoy the courses he's done for Great Courses (paid but worth it, available on ~Amazon):
(1) The Story of Language: covers the topic of language evolution; how languages change over time, how new words are introduced, how languages mix (due to e.g. invasions), pidgins/creoles
(2) Language Families of the World: a survey of what languages currently exist, features of languages in different families
Comment · 6 years ago
It seems like there's a lot in common here with the idea behind design patterns and pattern languages: giving names to "chunks" of expert knowledge in order to allow those chunks to be communicated, taught, and put in relation to other ideas.
Comment · 9 years ago
It's obscure, honestly. But most cryptocurrency enthusiasts use the term to mean a blockchain (the data structure) together with a protocol for "consensus" (acceptance of a single instance of that data structure), commonly proof of work / "Nakamoto consensus".
Comment · 9 years ago
Ya know, Radia Perlman has decades of experience working on networking protocols, I'm willing to bet she understands blockchain as well as anybody. The statement "I cannot distinguish exactly what makes something blockchain technology" should probably translate as "currently the term 'blockchain' is thrown about so loosely its meaning is obscure."
Comment · 9 years ago
Eh. But inflation only affects nominal assets like bonds and bank account balances. Real assets like houses or stocks (to a degree) would be expected to rise along with inflation.
That makes inflation distortionary, not some ideal tax on wealth. Governments can't just run away with inflation as an alternative to tax.
Comment · 9 years ago
Instead of arguing to go to Mars, let's get the military interested in kinetic bombardment systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
Clearly we need one because North Korea or terrorists or sharks or whatever.
It's so expensive to put all that metal into space, they'll get interested in asteroid mining before long. And once there's a market for orbital-velocity asteroid metal... profit!
Comment · 9 years ago
I don't understand how the administration can support this change.
Allowing carriers to discriminate against content providers seems like legalizing extortion.
Is there an argument in favor of this change that would convince a reasonable person?
Comment · 9 years ago
Yeah, you could argue, "Prime is sufficiently expensive and video streaming is a sufficiently large part of Prime that it's not dumping".
I can see that, it's possible. I mean, if Prime cost $1, it wouldn't be a good argument, but Prime is more expensive than that in reality. How much of the value of Prime is in streaming video (as opposed to free shipping)? It's hard to say (for an outsider at least, I'm sure someone at the company has run the numbers).
The gray area here does make the situation a little more confusing...
For the sake of argument, what if we suppose Prime costs $1/year and the value of free shipping is more than that. Would that be the kind of situation where the government would take antitrust action?
Comment · 9 years ago
Hadn't heard of that before, thanks!
In this case, I understood the question to be "will deep learning do a good job predicting the function of/phenotype emerging from individual SNPs" and I don't think model interpretation would help (for starters, the model is trained to predict linkage and doesn't deal with data related to phenotypes).
I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."
One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":
"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""
https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/