I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time.
Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers!
In this formulation, s_k equals utility. Like the Wilson score formula (and unlike the linked article), the provided equation takes into account the variance of the expected utility.
This Economist article's a bit chatty and superficial (surprise), but in an age of mass anxiety and digital distraction, I think the goal of the Epicureans is as important as ever: How does one go about producing a calm mind? It's not a simple task, and I think correctly has to analyze the mind in relation to everything else.
The atomic hypothesis of the Epicureans seems like a side quest into physics, but the fruit of the journey is that everything's just combinations of atoms and the mind must be made of atoms too, so let's think of it as a physical system with inputs and outputs, and forget about any grander god-narratives. With this perspective comes some very practical advice; Lucretius for instance has an extended passage on how to deal with a "crush". I'll paraphrase but he points out that your crush exists purely as an image in your head, and you really have no idea what the person behind the image is like, and if you finally get together the sex will probably be very awkward, so it's better to direct your mind and amorous intentions elsewhere. I believe the phrase he used was to find smaller pleasures that carry no penalty -- because seeking the larger rewards almost always leads to misery.
Lucretius is a good read and the Latham translation has some felicitous turns of phrase. It's fun imagining arguing with the ancient philosophers about their physical theories, which they support (as best they can) with the available evidence about what wind, liquids, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, smells, tastes, sights, etc. are made of. It's a shame philosophy got distracted with "higher things" for so long (i.e. 2,000 years) because here we are realizing again that everything is made of atoms, and it sure would be nice to have more advice on living life in the face of this fact.
Nice interactive examples but I'm afraid the basic setup here doesn't make sense to me. The "atom" is defined as the average encoding of inputs with the feature ("faces with a smile"), but I'd think the proper definition should subtract off inputs without the feature (i.e. "smile" = "faces with a smile" minus "faces without a smile"). The way it's defined you end up adding an extra "average face" along with the feature of interest, which is clearly seen in "The Geometry of Thought Vectors" example -- the non-smiling woman isn't so much forced to smile as to have her face merged with that of a generic smiling woman.
I'm a fan of this library -- I used it to build Hecate (https://github.com/evanmiller/hecate), a terminal hex editor. If you get creative with Unicode box and box-drawing characters, you can build some interesting interfaces (tabs, progress bars, etc).
Hey guys! I know I'm a little late to the conversation, and while tragedies like this are totally sad and tragic, they're not unpreventable. Here at BurritoTech, we've developed a few apps that perhaps could have averted the unnecessary death of little Nieto:
* NiceButt(tm) -- See a female jogger butt that strikes your fancy? With a press of a button we'll use your location and a proprietary algorithm to figure out to whom the lovely butt belongs -- and let you instantly browse pictures of that butt from multiple angles in multiple urban settings with varied jogging attire. No more distracted, in-person butt-staring while your unleashed dog intimidates a local minority.
* DogWhistle(tm) -- Is a large, unleashed dog barking and howling at you while its owner is staring at a female jogger butt? Record an audio sample of the bark sound, and our machine-learning, digital-signal-processing algorithm will tell you instantly whether it's a friendly, doggie-needs-a-tummy rub yap, or else the howling harbinger of your death.
* GangColors(tm) -- Is a nearby minority wearing a colorful jacket? Simply upload a picture of the jacket from any angle, and a team of on-call experts will tell you whether the jacket signifies affiliation with organized crime or with an NFL team -- or both!
* GunMeBro(tm) -- Think "Uber for loaded handguns". Do you know that feeling when you want to "stand your ground" -- but you left your hand cannon back at the office? With GunMeBro, press a button and an independent contractor will personally deliver a gun into the palm of your hand -- this way, you can keep staring into the eyes of your interlocutor and wincing menacingly until you have the means to perform an execution-style killing without legal repercussion. (Service only available in Florida.)
* NoYouCall(tm) -- Are you scared of a nearby minority -- but even more scared of having a social interaction with the 911 dispatcher? If your romantic partner refuses to call the police because he thinks it's a bad idea, you can now take matters into your own hands with NoYouCall. Simply take a short video of the suspicious person, and let our experts do the rest! Our on-call team will make a best-guess identification of the person's race, height, and visa status, imbue various possible nefarious motives to their physical movements, and describe the situation to the emergency-dispatch operator in the most harrowing, blood-curdling manner possible. If the cops don't arrive within five minutes -- with weapons drawn and a police helicopter on the horizon -- we'll even refund you 100% of your money! ($0.99 in the App Store and on Google Play)
Sadly, unnecessary death is a growing market -- but tragedy breeds opportunity, and we're planning to expand our offerings in the near future (including PerfectAlibi, a tool to help police departments get their story straight after gunning down unarmed minorities).
Here at BurritoTech we're always "on the lookout" for communications directors, email marketing managers, and ninja-star user experience design professionals -- so if your skills are "in that category of people I would not mess around with", please drop us a line! Send resumes to rememberingnieto [at] burrito [dot] io. Our office is in downtown SF but most of us work remotely from Marin County and more suburban environments.
The method described here is simple because it's only looking at the mean of the belief about each item; it uses the prior belief as a way either to sandbag new items or to give them a bump. I tend to advocate methods that take into account the variance of the belief in order to minimize the risk of showing bad stuff at the top of the heap.
I have a newer article (not mentioned here) that ranks 5-star items using the variance of the belief. It ends up yielding a relatively simple formula, or at least a formula that doesn't require special functions. Like the OP I use a Dirichlet prior, but then I approximate the variance of the utility in addition to the expected utility:
The weakness of the approach (as well as the OP) is that it doesn't really define a loss function for decision-making (i.e. doesn't properly account for the costs of an incorrect belief), which one might argue is the whole point of being a Bayesian in the first place. In practice it seems that using a percentile point on the belief ends up approximating a multi-linear loss function, but I haven't worked out why that is.
This is a compelling little essay. I think the author left out a couple of important points, though.
1. Design systems may be "algorithmic," but they're primarily mathematical, and equations remain stubbornly hard to use. Metafont failed to attract designers because no one wanted to cook up high-order polynomials to express their visual ideas. (In contrast, Adobe came up with a good-enough interface for Bezier curves, and now the world uses non-algorithmic fonts.) The new class of designers will need solid grounding in at least high school algebra to get their curves and easing functions right.
2. Any argument about "XXX should learn to code", where XXX is anything other than "aspiring professional software developers," means that there is a significant market opportunity for creating usable software that does not require coding. If people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on bootcamps to learn to code -- when they'd really rather be focusing on their domain problem -- then they're theoretically willing to pay thousands of dollars to not have to learn how to code.
I don't know the state of design software, but if it's anything like other professional desktop tools, it's horrible, creaky software stuck in the early 1990s with very little competition in sight. When I read this essay I can't help but think there's an opening for usable algorithmic design software -- whatever that may look like.
Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers!
https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html