singham

Let's say we ban development of self-driving cars since the algos can't be explained. Then we will never know the benefit we might reap from adopting them. We know humans make mistake. But with self-driving cars, the error rates in future might be very low as compared to human. We as a human society will never experience this future because we had this silly idealism that all algos must explain themselves in human terms.

Comment · 9 years ago

Amazon will surely buy you once your product matures. I can see that happening.

Comment · 9 years ago

I have used Nhibernate in my project at a company. But beyond simple queries we hit a performance issue. For a complex query, it took about 10 seconds to load the data to the frontend. So we had to rewrite the "code logic" ( the Nhibernate part ) into an "custom sql query" (Nhibernate allows you to write custom queries ) and then write custom mappers to map the results back to our application. The reason is Nhibernate does its processing objectwise and inmemory.

Comment · 9 years ago

I cannot agree with this more. Universe has been existing without intelligent observers for billions of years. It stands to reason that universe is constantly being shaped as particles interact.

Comment · 9 years ago

Anyone who thinks that QM is making stuff up, please watch this video. Here Rubidium atoms (mind you atoms and not electrons or photos) are made to interfere with each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_w6AGe_fIo

Quantum mechanics is a foundation of physics, chemistry and materials science. Still, there is an ongoing debate about the emergence of the classical, macroscopic world from the well-understood microscopic world of quantum mechanics. We contribute to this discourse by demonstrating quantum superposition of massive particles at the distance (0.5 m) and time scales (2 s) of everyday life, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art of atom de Broglie wave interferometry by nearly two orders of magnitude [1]. In addition to testing a central tenet of quantum mechanics, we pave the way for new precision tests of gravity, including the possible observation of gravitational waves and tests of the equivalence principle. In related experimental work, we demonstrate that entangled clusters of approximately 1000 atoms can be used to achieve 10-fold improvement in the sensitivity of quantum sensors based on atomic transitions; the levels of performance achieved could not have been realized with any competing (non-entangled) method [2].

Comment · 9 years ago

https://github.com/erikbern/deep-fonts

Comment · 9 years ago

> “Why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.” [from the article]

This is true for majority of us. But for some people, unconscious doesn't even use images. E.g. Aphantasia.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

What would Cormac say about this? Say if human evolution would have picked up the "Aphantasia" gene to spread then Cormac's main question the "Kekule problem" would dissolve or won't arise.

Comment · 9 years ago

According to "theory of meaning",

In “General Semantics,” David Lewis wrote

I distinguish two topics: first, the description of possible languages or grammars as abstract semantic systems whereby symbols are associated with aspects of the world; and, second, the description of the psychological and sociological facts whereby a particular one of these abstract semantic systems is the one used by a person or population. Only confusion comes of mixing these two topics.

[1] : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/