mlurp

I'm curious, how do you lay face down? Do you turn your head sideways or have a special pillow? It sounds painful to me.

I have an unpopular opinion: matplotlib sucks, but it's going to be really hard to improve on it.

I don't think I need to give anyone reasons why it sucks, but the reason it's going to be hard to replace is that it can do so much. You can make other plotting libraries that are way easier to do a small subset of things with, but as soon as you want strange, lower level, customizable things, you start having to build in little hacks and workarounds. If you have enough of these, you'll eventually get mpl.

I think this is a really valuable way of thinking. Something similar I wish everyone would ask themselves is "why do I have this opinion/belief/etc?" for any topic.

Just like most religious people are the religion that their parents were, most people don't really choose their political beliefs. It's not to say we don't learn justifications for what we believe, but it means that the fact that we believe in one thing over another is somewhat random imo.

Somewhere out there in the US is someone who's pretty similar to me in most ways, they were just born in a part of the country where their default beliefs are different.

And for consistency, I do put more stake in someone's beliefs when they change from their "defaults".

I've done a few small personal projects in d3 and I like it a lot. My biggest gripe though, is that I can't find decent online help for it. It's not popular enough to have its own subreddit/stack exchange. So often when I've been stuck, I end up having to find 5 year old stack overflow threads that work about half the time.

Is there a good community for it I don't know about? Great tool either way though.

Honestly, just being careful and catching mistakes. On almost every project I've worked on, I've found a few. When things get big enough, what's the chance that there's not some mistake? Just reviewing through things carefully, with a fresh set of eyes, can often get a few of them.

I'm hoping/wondering if 2020 will be the year there's some sort of real cultural shift in how this is all viewed. We already know about all the research pointing to social media making people generally less happy, but a huge part of the internet/tech economy is just ads and services that... bluntly, don't really add much to the world. And a ton of capital and human effort is going into that.

I don't have any love for Microsoft, but they at least have a handful of objectively useful products that probably make the world a little better.

Pretty much all the research I've heard about social media indicates that it makes the world worse. So I think it is relevant.

I think it's a funny coincidence that he says "Light acts as a medium of information transfer here.", because IMO this article is only a medium of info transfer from the source he links at the bottom (to be fair, at least he links it) without adding much.

I don't think there's anything wrong with making personal blog posts about learning well established concepts, but promoting them is the reason we have a million Medium/etc articles that are just regurgitating a paper without adding anything of substance.

This can really apply to almost everything though, since if I understand you, it seems to be about progress in the face impermanence. The history of science is basically a constant process of things kind of working, then breaking. But overall it goes forward and things are better off for it. In contrast, I find it kind of inspiring.

Is this true? From what I've read about Alpha Zero/etc, in both Go and chess, it's going interesting move sequences that people hadn't considered viable before. That certainly seems like an interesting thing to learn.

Also, sure, you can dismiss it all as statistics. But how sure are you that what's happening with humans isn't in some form? I'd also say that MCTS is something people kind of do too in games: look a few moves deep and try to judge the value of that position, which is definitely more interesting than simple RL/bookkeeping/stats.

Wait, is that right?

I thought your definition of immoral there is correct. But I thought that "gray area" means a person has morals, but the goodness of the topic is tricky to decide, while "amoral" just means the person doesn't even have a "right and wrong" scale, or doesn't care.

Because you did 5-8-5!

I agree with you in general, but there are much better people to do that with than Crowder. He doesn't seem like he's acting in good faith, and more generally, think about stuff very much.

There are plenty of intelligent conservatives/whatever that don't do the stuff he does that's just intended to be offensive/get attention.

I think a lot of AI research now is very narrow, but this ignores that there's also a lot of research in RL/etc that's working to solve the problem of generalization.

Meta learning is for solving similar problems from a distribution (like different sized boards in your chess example) and has taken off recently (only baby steps so far though). Modular learning is also becoming big, where concepts that are repeatedly used are stored/generalized.

Ah sorry, I think I see now. Do you mean that his baseline amount he uses every day is less than the deficit, so even if he consumed nothing, it still wouldn't be enough?